The Routledge Handbook of Applied Linguistics: Volume Two [2 ed.] 0367536242, 9780367536244

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of tables and figures
List of contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part I Applied linguistics in society
1 Multilingualism
2 Language and migration
3 Language policy and planning
4 Family language policy
5 Critical discourse analysis, critical discourse studies, and critical applied linguistics
6 Digital language and communication
7 Intercultural communication
8 Institutional discourse
9 Medical communication
10 English for professional communication: a critical genre analytical perspective
11 Identity
12 Gender and sexuality
13 Language and race
14 Politics and applied linguistics
15 World Englishes and English as a lingua franca
Part II Broadening horizons
16 Sign languages
17 Lexicography
18 Translation and interpreting
19 First language attrition: bridging sociolinguistic narratives and psycholinguistic models of attrition
20 Clinical linguistics
21 Language and ageing
22 Forensic linguistics
23 Linguistic ethnography
24 Posthumanism and applied linguistics
25 Social semiotics and multimodality
26 Linguistic landscapes
27 Minoritized/Indigenous language revitalization
28 Endangered languages
29 Ecolinguistics in practice
30 Translanguaging
Index

Citation preview

The Routledge Handbook of Applied Linguistics

The Routledge Handbook of Applied Linguistics, published in 2011, has long been a standard introduction and essential reference point to the broad interdisciplinary field of applied linguistics. Reflecting the growth and widening scope of applied linguistics, this new edition thoroughly updates and expands coverage. It includes 27 new chapters, now consists of two complementary volumes, and covers a wide range of topics from a variety of perspectives. Volume One is organized into two sections – ‘Language learning and language education’ and ‘Key areas and approaches in applied linguistics’ – and Volume Two also has two sections – ‘Applied linguistics in society’ and ‘Broadening horizons’. Each volume includes 30 chapters written by specialists from around the world. Each chapter provides an overview of the history of the topic, the main current issues, recommendations for practice, and possible future trajectories. Where appropriate, authors discuss the impact and use of new research methods in the area. Suggestions for further reading and cross-references are provided with every chapter. The Routledge Handbook of Applied Linguistics remains the authoritative overview of this dynamic field and essential reading for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students, scholars, and researchers of applied linguistics. Li Wei is Director and Dean of the UCL Institute of Education at University College London, UK, where he is also Chair of Applied Linguistics. He is Editor of International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism and Applied Linguistics Review. He is Fellow of the British Academy, Academia Europaea, Academy of Social Sciences (UK), and Royal Society of Arts (UK). Zhu Hua is Professor of Language Learning and Intercultural Communication and Director of the International Centre for Intercultural Studies at University College London, UK. She is an elected Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (UK), and an elected Fellow and board member of the International Academy for Intercultural Research. She is Chair of the British Association for Applied Linguistics (BAAL), 2021–2024. James Simpson is Professor in the Division of Humanities at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He is the Director of the MA programme in International Language Education. He was formerly in the School of Education, University of Leeds, UK.

Routledge Handbooks in Applied Linguistics

Routledge Handbooks in Applied Linguistics provide comprehensive overviews of the key topics in applied linguistics. All entries for the handbooks are specially commissioned and written by leading scholars in the field. Clear, accessible and carefully edited, Routledge Handbooks in Applied Linguistics are the ideal resource for both advanced undergraduates and postgraduate students. The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Linguistics Second Edition Edited by Anne O’Keeffe and Michael J. McCarthy The Routledge Handbook of Materials Development for Language Teaching Edited by Julie Norton and Heather Buchanan The Routledge Handbook of Corpora and English Language Teaching and Learning Edited by Reka R. Jablonkai and Eniko Csomay The Routledge Handbook of Language and the Global South Edited by Sinfree Makoni, Anna Kaiper-Marquez and Lorato Mokwena The Routledge Handbook of Discourse Analysis Second Edition Edited by Michael Handford and James Paul Gee The Routledge Handbook of Content and Language Integrated Learning Edited by Darío Luis Banegas and Sandra Zappa-Hollman The Routledge Handbook of Applied Linguistics Volume One, Second Edition Edited by Li Wei, Zhu Hua, and James Simpson The Routledge Handbook of Applied Linguistics Volume Two, Second Edition Edited by Li Wei, Zhu Hua, and James Simpson The Routledge Handbook of Language Policy and Planning Edited by Michele Gazzola, François Grin, Linda Cardinal, and Kathleen Heugh For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com/Routledge-Handbooks-inApplied-Linguistics/book-series/RHAL

The Routledge Handbook of Applied Linguistics Volume Two Second Edition

Edited by Li Wei, Zhu Hua, and James Simpson

Designed cover image: © Getty Images | Gokcemim Second edition published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Li Wei, Zhu Hua, and James Simpson; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Li Wei, Zhu Hua, and James Simpson to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. First edition published by Routledge 2011 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Li, Wei, 1961- editor. | Hua, Zhu, 1970- editor. | Simpson, James, 1967- editor. Title: The Routledge handbook of applied linguistics / edited by Li Wei, Zhu Hua, James Simpson. Description: Second edition. | Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2023- | Series: Routledge handbooks in applied linguistics | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Contents: v. 1. Language learning and language education—v. 2. Applied linguistics in action. Identifiers: LCCN 2022057713 | ISBN 9780367536220 (v. 1-2 ; hardback) | ISBN 9780367536213 (v. 1-2 ; paperback) | ISBN 9781003082620 (v. 1-2 ; eBook) | ISBN 9780367536275 (v. 1 ; hardback) | ISBN 9780367536268 (v. 1 ; paperback) | ISBN 9781003082644 (v. 1 ; eBook) | ISBN 9780367536244 (v. 2 ; hardback) | ISBN 9780367536237 (v. 2 ; paperback) | ISBN 9781003082637 (v. 2 ; eBook) Subjects: LCSH: Applied linguistics. | LCGFT: Essays. Classification: LCC P129 .R683 2023 | DDC 418—dc22/eng/20230117 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022057713 ISBN: 978-0-367-53624-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-53623-7 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-08263-7 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003082637 Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of tables and figures List of contributors Acknowledgements Introduction Li Wei, Zhu Hua, and James Simpson

viii ix xvi 1

PART I

Applied linguistics in society 1 Multilingualism Jasone Cenoz and Durk Gorter

5 7

2 Language and migration Mike Baynham and James Simpson

19

3 Language policy and planning Lionel Wee

31

4 Family language policy Kendall A. King

44

5 Critical discourse analysis, critical discourse studies, and critical applied linguistics Karin Zotzmann and John P. O’Regan

57

6 Digital language and communication Caroline Tagg

68

7 Intercultural communication Zhu Hua

81

v

Contents

8 Institutional discourse Zsófia Demjén and Miguel Pérez-Milans 9 Medical communication Sarah Collins, Sarah Peters, and Ian Watt 10 English for professional communication: a critical genre analytical perspective Vijay K. Bhatia and Aditi Bhatia

94 109

123

11 Identity Bonny Norton and Monica Shank Lauwo

137

12 Gender and sexuality Helen Sauntson

151

13 Language and race Jennifer B. Delfino and H. Samy Alim

163

14 Politics and applied linguistics Philip Seargeant

176

15 World Englishes and English as a lingua franca Andy Kirkpatrick and David Deterding

187

PART II

Broadening horizons

201

16 Sign languages Bencie Woll and Rachel Sutton-Spence

203

17 Lexicography Thierry Fontenelle

216

18 Translation and interpreting Mona Baker and Luis Pérez-González

230

19 First language attrition: bridging sociolinguistic narratives and psycholinguistic models of attrition Beatriz Duarte Wirth, Anita Auer, and Merel Keijzer 20 Clinical linguistics Vesna Stojanovik, Michael Perkins, and Sara Howard vi

243 254

Contents

21 Language and ageing Lihe Huang

267

22 Forensic linguistics Tim Grant and Tahmineh Tayebi

280

23 Linguistic ethnography Karin Tusting

292

24 Posthumanism and applied linguistics Kelleen Toohey

306

25 Social semiotics and multimodality Theo van Leeuwen

320

26 Linguistic landscapes Robert Blackwood and Will Amos

337

27 Minoritized/Indigenous language revitalization Nancy H. Hornberger and Haley De Korne

349

28 Endangered languages Julia Sallabank and Peter K. Austin

362

29 Ecolinguistics in practice Stephen Cowley

374

30 Translanguaging Li Wei

386

Index

396

vii

Tables and figures

Tables 21.1

Language characteristic changes from MCI to Severe AD

271

Figures 5.1 10.1 10.2 11.1 15.1 25.1 25.2 25.3

viii

Fairclough’s three-dimensional view of discourse English for professional communication overlaps Theory of interdiscursive performance Darvin and Norton’s model of investment Sign on the door of a shop in Singapore The system of social distance The parametric system of voice quality Rhythmic analysis of an excerpt from North by Northwest

59 124 133 142 194 323 325 328

Contributors

H. Samy Alim is the David O. Spears Presidential Endowed Chair in the Social Sciences in the Department of Anthropology and Associate Director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is also the founding director of the Center for Race, Ethnicity, and Language (2010), co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Language and Race (2020, with Angela Reyes and Paul Kroskrity), and editor of the book series Oxford Studies in Language and Race. Will Amos is Associate Professor at the University of Warwick, UK, where he is a member of

the Translation and Transcultural Studies section within the School of Modern Languages and Cultures. He is co-editor of the Bloomsbury Handbook of Linguistic Landscapes (forthcoming, with Stefania Tufi and Robert Blackwood). In 2021, he co-founded the international crossdisciplinary research network Wearable Ideologies (WE•ID).

Anita Auer is Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Lausanne (UNIL). She is

a (historical) sociolinguist with a special interest in diachronic and synchronic aspects of language variation and change. Her recent research interests focus, among other things, on (historical) sociolinguistic approaches to heritage languages – for instance, language maintenance and shift among Swiss heritage speakers in North America.

Peter K. Austin (Emeritus Professor in Field Linguistics, SOAS, University of London)

researches theory and practice of language documentation and revitalization and languages of Australia and eastern Indonesia.

Mona Baker is Affiliate Professor at the Centre for Sustainable Healthcare Education, Univer-

sity of Oslo; Co-cordinator of the Genealogies of Knowledge Research Network; and Director of the Baker Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies at Shanghai International Studies University.

Mike Baynham, Emeritus Professor of TESOL in the School of Education, University of Leeds, and Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, is a sociolinguist by training and applied linguist by affiliation. He has a long-term research interest in language and migration, particularly in migration narratives. His monograph Translation and Translanguaging, jointly written with Tong King Lee, was published with Routledge in 2019. Aditi Bhatia is Associate Professor at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Her main interest is in (critical) discourse analysis using the multi-perspective theoretical framework of the ix

Contributors

discourse of illusion with focus on public argumentation in political and media discourses. Her publications include Discursive Illusions in Public Discourse: Theory and Practice (Routledge, 2015). She is currently working on analyzing identity-construction in discourses of war and populism, as well as in digital professions. Vijay K. Bhatia is Adjunct Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research

interests include (critical) genre theory, ESP, and professional communication. His publications include Analysing Genre: Language Use in Professional Settings (1993), Worlds of Written Discourse: A Genre-based View (2004), and Critical Genre Analysis: Interdiscursive Performance in Professional Practice (2017).

Robert Blackwood is Professor of French Sociolinguistics at the University of Liverpool,

UK, and currently the editor of the journal Linguistic Landscape with Elana Shohamy. He is the co-author with Stefania Tufi of The Linguistic Landscape of the Mediterranean (2015) and co-editor with John Macalister of Multilingual Memories: Monuments, Museums and the Linguistic Landscape (2020).

Jasone Cenoz is Professor of Education at the University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU

(Spain) and President of the Education Science Committee of the Spanish Research Council (AEI). Her research focuses on multilingual education, bilingualism, and multilingualism. She has published extensively and has presented her work at conferences in many countries. She is the chair of the Book Award Committee of AAAL.

Sarah Collins is Senior Lecturer in Clinical Communication at the University of Edinburgh. Her disciplines are linguistics, social sciences, and medical education. For the past 20 years Sarah has developed and led communication training and curriculum innovations for students in the healthcare professions. Stephen Cowley is Professor at the University of Southern Denmark; his ecological view of language and cognition builds on study of prosody in conversations, mother-infant interaction, classroom activity, and organizational use of drones. He has edited Distributed Language, Cognition Beyond the Brain, and Biosemiotic Perspectives on Language and Linguistics. Haley De Korne is Associate Professor of Multilingualism at the Department of Linguistics

and Scandinavian Studies and a member of the Center for Multilingualism in Society across the Lifespan at the University of Oslo. She conducts research and advocacy in relation to minoritized language education and language politics.

Jennifer B. Delfino is a linguistic anthropologist who studies language, racialization, and racial inequality in the urban United States. She is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She is an associate editor for Journal of Linguistic Anthropology and the author of Speaking of Race: Language, Race, and Schooling Among African American Children (2020, Lexington Books). Zsófia Demjén is Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics at University College London and

specializes in illness and healthcare discourse ([im]politeness, metaphor, humour, narrative). She is the author of Sylvia Plath and the Language of Affective States: Written Discourse and

x

Contributors

the Experience of Depression (2015, Bloomsbury), co-author of Metaphor, Cancer and the End of Life: A corpus-based study (2018, Routledge), editor of Applying Linguistics in Illness and Healthcare Contexts (2020, Bloomsbury), and co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Metaphor and Language (2017). David Deterding is Visiting Professor at Universiti Brunei Darussalam, where he has taught

phonetics, forensic linguistics, Malay-English translation, and research methods in linguistics. His research focuses on acoustic phonetics, description of varieties of English in Southeast Asia, misunderstandings in English as a lingua franca, and the pronunciation of Malay.

Beatriz Duarte Wirth is a doctoral student at the University of Lausanne (UNIL). Her research interests are multilingualism, language development in adults, crosslinguistic interaction, and migration. As part of her PhD project, she explores multilingual communities, with a focus on heritage languages. Her research investigates whether speakers of typologically different languages (e.g. English and Portuguese) experience language attrition differently when immersed in a French-speaking context. Thierry Fontenelle is Head of the European Investment Bank’s Linguistic Services Division. His publications include Practical Lexicography: A Reader (OUP, 2008) and his PhD at the University of Liège, ‘Turning a bilingual dictionary into a lexical-semantic database’ (Niemeyer, 1997). He is also the former president of the European Association for Lexicography (EURALEX) and an associate editor of the International Journal of Lexicography. Durk Gorter is Ikerbasque Research Professor at the University of the Basque Country UPV/ EHU (Spain), where he is the head of the Donostia Research Group on Education and Multilingualism (DREAM). He carries out research on multilingual education, European minority languages and linguistic landscapes. He is the editor of the journal Language, Culture and Curriculum, and he obtained the award of Distinguished Scholar of Multilingualism from the International Association of Multilingualism. Tim Grant is Professor of Forensic Linguistics and Director of the Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics at Aston University, UK. His main research interests are in forensic linguistics generally and forensic authorship analysis specifically. He also has extensive experience as a consulting forensic linguist. Nancy H. Hornberger, Professor Emerita at the University of Pennsylvania, researches mul-

tilingual education, language policy, and language revitalization internationally, specializing in Indigenous, immigrant, and refugee contexts. A widely published author, she also served as editor of the Anthropology and Education Quarterly and the Encyclopedia of Language and Education (second edition).

Sara Howard is Emeritus Professor of Clinical Phonetics in the Division of Human Communication Sciences at the University of Sheffield, UK. Sara has published and presented widely in the area of clinical phonetics and phonology and is an ex-president of the International Association of Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics. Lihe Huang is Associate Professor and General Secretary of the Research Centre for Ageing,

Language and Care, as well as Deputy Director of the Institute of Linguistics and Multimodality xi

Contributors

at Tongji University, utilizing multifaceted disciplinary approaches to studying the linguistic performance of older adults. He has been constructing Multimodal Corpus of Gerontic Discourse (MCGD) for language and ageing studies in China. He is Humboldt Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and Honorary Postgraduate Supervisor at the University of Liverpool. Merel Keijzer is Professor of English Linguistics and English as a Second Language at the Uni-

versity of Groningen. Her research interests focus on multilingualism, multilingual processing, and the interplay between multilingualism and cognition across the lifespan, with a focus on older adulthood. She is also interested in second language learning as a cognitive intervention in healthy and (pre)clinical elderly populations. She heads the Bilingualism and Aging Lab (BALAB) in Groningen.

Kendall A. King is Professor of Multilingual Education at the University of Minnesota. Her

teaching and research address language policy, bilingualism and language learning, and language use, identity, and ideology. She is particularly interested in how minoritized languages such as Spanish or Ojibwe are best supported through official policies and practices at home and at school.

Andy Kirkpatrick is Professor Emeritus at Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia, and a member of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He is editor of the Routledge Handbook of World Englishes (2020) and co-editor, with Anthony Liddicoat, of the Routledge Handbook of Language Education Policy in Asia (2019). His most recent book is Is English an Asian Language? Cambridge University Press (2020). Bonny Norton (FRSC) is a University Killam Professor and Distinguished University Scholar in Language and Literacy Education, University of British Columbia. Her research addresses identity and language learning, digital storytelling, and open technology. She was BC 2020 Academic of the Year for her leadership of the Global Storybooks project (https://globalstorybooks.net/). John P. O’Regan is Professor of Critical Applied Linguistics at IOE, Faculty of Education and

Society, University College London, UK. His work spans critical discourse analysis, political economy, world Englishes, and intercultural communication. He is the author of Global English and Political Economy (Routledge, 2021).

Luis Pérez-González is Professor of Translation Studies at the Department of Foreign Lan-

guages and Translation, University of Agder (Norway). He is the author of Audiovisual Translation: Theories, Methods and Issues (2014), editor of the Routledge Handbook of Audiovisual Translation (2018) and co-editor of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Citizen Media (2020).

Miguel Pérez-Milans is Associate Professor at University College London. He is the author

of Urban Schools and English Language Education in Late Modern China: A Critical Sociolinguistic Ethnography (2013, Routledge), co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Language Policy and Planning (2018, Oxford University Press), and recipient of the 2019 British Association for Applied Linguistics Book Prize. Miguel is also the co-editor for Language Policy

xii

Contributors

(Springer) and Language, Culture and Society (John Benjamins) and serves as the co-president of EDiSo Association for Studies in Discourse and Society. Michael (Mick) Perkins is Emeritus Professor of Clinical Linguistics in the Division of Human Communication Sciences at the University of Sheffield, UK. He has presented and published widely in clinical linguistics, pragmatics, semantics, and language development. Sarah Peters, a chartered health psychologist, is Professor of Psychology at the University of Manchester. Her research focuses on healthcare interactions, particularly within challenging contexts, such as explaining ‘medically unexplained’ symptoms and supporting health behaviour change. The goal of Sarah’s work is to improve patient care through health professional education. Julia Sallabank is Professor of Language Policy and Revitalization at SOAS, University of London. She researches and teaches sociolinguistics and language policy and planning, especially the revitalization and documentation of minority and endangered languages worldwide. Helen Sauntson is Professor of English Language and Linguistics at York St John University, UK. She has published widely in the areas of language in education and language, gender, and sexuality. She co-edits two book series: Palgrave Studies in Language, Gender and Sexuality and Cambridge Elements in Language, Gender and Sexuality. Philip Seargeant is Senior Lecturer at the Open University, where he specializes in language

and communication. He has published books on topics ranging from social media to political persuasion and English around the world, including the Routledge Handbook of English Language Studies (with Ann Hewings and Stephen Pihlaja).

Monica Shank Lauwo is a PhD candidate in Language and Literacy Education at the Uni-

versity of British Columbia. As an educator, teacher educator, and researcher, she is centrally interested in ways in which language and literacy can be mobilized to disrupt inequitable systems of power, and to support antiracist, decolonial struggles. Her research interests include translanguaging, multiliteracies, identity, teacher education, critical literacy, and language ideologies, in East Africa and Canada.

James Simpson is Professor in the Division of Humanities at the Hong Kong University of

Science and Technology. He is the Director of the MA programme in International Language Education. He was formerly in the School of Education, University of Leeds.

Vesna Stojanovik is Professor of Clinical Linguistics at the School of Psychology and Clinical

Language Sciences at the University of Reading. She is the vice president of the International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association (since 2018). Vesna has published widely in the field of developmental disorders, focusing on language development in children with genetic disorders.

Rachel Sutton-Spence has been involved in research and teaching about sign languages since 1989. She is the co-author, with Bencie Woll, of The Linguistics of BSL (1998). Her special

xiii

Contributors

interest is in the creative uses of sign language, such as sign language literature and humour. Having worked for 25 years on British Sign Language (BSL) in the UK, she currently works in the Department of Brazilian Sign Language at the Federal University of Santa Catarina, where she is affiliated with the postgraduate program in translation. Caroline Tagg is Senior Lecturer in Applied Linguistics at the Open University, UK. Her research explores the role of digital communication in individuals’ lives. Her recent books include Mobile Messaging and Resourcefulness: A Post-Digital Ethnography (2022, with Agnieszka Lyons) and Message and Medium: English Language Practices across Old and New Media (2020, edited with Mel Evans). Tahmineh Tayebi is Lecturer in Forensic Linguistics at Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics

at Aston University, UK. Her area of research includes language aggression and impoliteness. She is particularly interested in online offensive and abusive language and other similar phenomena, such as cyberbullying and hate crimes.

Kelleen Toohey is Professor Emerita at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, BC. Working with Indigenous, heritage, and English language teachers and researchers, her work is published in various language education journals. Her work Learning English at school: Identity, socio-material relations and classroom practice (2018) considers the contributions of posthumanism to classroom research. Karin Tusting is Professor in the Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster

University. Her research interests are in the area of workplace literacies, most recently the university workplace. Her recent publications include Academics Writing: The Dynamics of Knowledge Creation (with McCulloch, Bhatt, Hamilton and Barton, Routledge 2019) and the Routledge Handbook of Linguistic Ethnography (editor, 2020).

Theo van Leeuwen is Professor of Language and Communication at the University of South-

ern Denmark. He has published widely in the area of visual communication, multimodality, critical discourse analysis, and social semiotics and was a founding editor of the journals Social Semiotics and Visual Communication. Recent publications include the third edition of Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design (with Gunther Kress), Visual and Multimodal Research in Organization and Management Studies (with Markus Höllerer and others), and Multimodality and Identity.

Ian Watt is Emeritus Professor of Primary Care at the University of York and the Hull York

Medical School (HYMS). He trained as a GP and public health physician and has worked in a variety of roles in research, education, and management alongside clinical commitments in general practice. A major part of his work related to interactions in healthcare.

Li Wei is Director and Dean of the UCL Institute of Education at University College London,

UK, where he is also Chair of Applied Linguistics. He is Editor of International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism and Applied Linguistics Review. He is Fellow of the British Academy, Academia Europaea, Academy of Social Sciences (UK), and Royal Society of Arts (UK).

xiv

Contributors

Lionel Wee is Provost’s Chair Professor in the Department of English, Linguistics and Theatre

Studies at the National University of Singapore. He sits on the editorial boards of Applied Linguistics, Elements: World Englishes, English World-Wide, International Journal of the Sociology of Language, Journal of Sociolinguistics, Multilingualisms and Diversities in Education, and Studies in World Language Problems, among others. His research interests include language policy, world Englishes, and general issues in sociolinguistics and pragmatics. Bencie Woll has been involved in research on sign language for over 40 years. In 2006, she co-founded the ESRC Deafness Cognition and Language Research Centre and served as its director until 2017. Her research interests in sign language embrace a wide range of topics, including the linguistics of British Sign Language (BSL), the history and sociolinguistics of BSL, deaf communities, deaf education, L1 and L2 acquisition of BSL, sign language and the brain, and most recently, machine translation of sign language. In 2012, she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy and, in 2016, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Zhu Hua is Professor of Language Learning and Intercultural Communication and Director of the International Centre for Intercultural Studies at University College London, UK. She is an elected Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (UK) and an elected Fellow and board member of the International Academy for Intercultural Research. She is Chair of the British Association for Applied Linguistics (BAAL), 2021–2024. Karin Zotzmann works as Associate Professor in Applied Linguistics at the University of Southampton. Her research interests include the ways socioeconomic, political, and institutional factors and processes impact upon language education and communication more generally. Her work is theoretically informed by critical realism.

xv

Acknowledgements

When Louisa Semlyen from Routledge asked us (Li Wei and Zhu Hua) over coffee whether we would be interested in leading a new edition of The Routledge Handbook of Applied Linguistics, we said yes without hesitation. That was July 2019, and life was busy but happy and rather different. Little did we know that the project would span over the COVID-19 pandemic, during which both of us changed our jobs significantly – Li Wei has taken on a major leadership role in his university and Zhu Hua has changed institutions twice. James Simpson, who masterfully edited the first edition of the successful Handbook, also changed his job and crossed continents to Hong Kong. The new handbook project provided a good distraction from social media and politics but was also interwoven with changes in our family and work circumstances. We are most grateful to Louisa Semlyen and her team in Routledge, in particular, Eleni Steck and Talitha Duncan-Todd, for their support, understanding, and gentle nudges along the way. We are equally grateful to Sahra Abdullahi, who has assisted us in communicating with the contributors of no fewer than 60 chapters and keeping track of the progress, and to Tania Douek, who stepped in at very short notice in the final copy-editing stage. We were most impressed by and grateful for our contributors’ commitment, fortitude, and support throughout this project. The new edition builds on the success of the first edition, published in 2011. Our gratitude is extended to the colleagues who were involved in the first edition in various capacities. Their effort has not been forgotten. This project is testimony to the dedication and achievements of generations of eminent scholars in the exciting and diverse field of applied linguistics. It will, we hope, contribute to the vitality of the field and showcase the best of what applied linguists can do.

xvi

Introduction Li Wei, Zhu Hua, and James Simpson

The new edition of the Routledge Handbook of Applied Linguistics builds on the success of the first edition, edited by James Simpson and published in 2011, by refreshing and expanding the coverage to reflect the developments of the field over the last decade. As with the first edition, the Handbook is intended as an essential reference to key topics in applied linguistics, with each chapter providing an accessible overview of an area of the field.

Applied linguistics as a transdisciplinary field Applied linguistics is a transdisciplinary field which connects knowledge about language and language users to policies and practices in specific contexts. Generally speaking, the role of the applied linguist is to make insights drawn from areas of language study, combined with other disciplinary approaches, relevant to society and individuals’ lives. In this sense, applied linguistics mediates between theory and practice. In the last decade, there has been a growing recognition of the value of new theorizations and conceptualizations that emerge from applied research with impact on policy and practice. Applied linguistics has shown the promise of becoming a theory of practice in itself (Kramsch 2015) or a practical theory of language and communication (Li 2018). The origins of applied linguistics lie in the mid-20th century effort to give an academic underpinning to the study of language teaching and learning. Until at least the 1980s, applied linguistics was most closely associated with the problems and puzzles surrounding language pedagogy, learning, and acquisition. Whilst language teaching and learning remains the core of applied linguistics of the 21st century, the focus of various subfields has shifted considerably. The acquisition and learning of specific domains of language (e.g. phonology, vocabulary, pragmatics) have become central issues for second language acquisition (SLA) research, and teacher development, material, and syllabus design have become core areas for TESOL and second and foreign language education. What remains under the rubric of applied linguistics are investigations of learner language (often with corpora), classroom discourse, motivation, learner strategy, content and task-based learning, and language testing. In the meantime, new areas have opened up for applied linguists to explore. For example, translanguaging or translingual practices, interculturality, intersections between translation and politics and the DOI: 10.4324/9781003082637-1

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Li Wei, Zhu Hua, and James Simpson

law, bi- and multilingualism, media discourse, forensic linguistics, sign language, language planning and language policy, and family language policy, as well as new issues of scholarly concerns, such as gender, ethnicity and social class, neoliberal ideologies, (in)equality and social justice, and linguistic landscapes. Some of these areas have long and well-established histories. But a new generation of applied linguists has joined established researchers to raise new questions and develop new analytical perspectives. Many of the new research sites came to the attention of applied linguists because of the intensification of global migration and contact between people of different linguistic and cultural backgrounds (Block and Cameron 2001). The applied linguist’s traditional focus on the language learner gradually expanded to the diversity of language user groups. Globalization and language contact also motivated some to raise questions of access to linguistic resources. A speaker’s apparent lack of proficiency in a particular language may have nothing to do with their cognitive capacity but could be the result of a lack of opportunity to access the necessary resources to learn and use the language. Such issues manifest themselves not only in language teaching classrooms but also in the workplace as well as health and legal contexts. The new edition of the Handbook further demonstrates the vitality and widening scope of the field through updating the chapters in the original edition and bringing in the new topics that have emerged in the last decade. Examples of the latter include chapters on content and language integrated learning, curriculum and material from the perspective of decolonization and inclusivity, language awareness, critical and post-humanist applied linguistics, linguistic landscapes, digital communication, language and race, ecolinguistics, and translanguaging. The diversity of interests of applied linguists and the ever-expanding scope of the field notwithstanding, applied linguistics maintains its distinctive conceptual focus. The most widely cited definition of applied linguistics comes from Christopher Brumfit, who describes it as ‘the theoretical and empirical investigation of real-world problems in which language is a central issue’ (1995: 27). Brumfit’s definition is broad enough to encompass the range of areas of enquiry indicated above. It also firmly distinguishes applied linguistics from other related fields by making it problem-oriented. While language is, of course, fundamental to human life and surrounds us, the problem orientation helps to delimit the field. That is, the motivation for applied linguistics lies not with an interest in autonomous or idealized language, as with understandings of linguistics which deal in linguistic universals: applied linguistics data is collected empirically in contexts of use. Neither is its concern with the entirety of ‘language in use’. It is demarcated by its interest in how language is implicated in real-world issues.

The scope and structure of the Handbook This new edition of the Handbook consists of two volumes, 30 chapters each, but retains a broadly similar chapter format, covering a history of the area, a critical discussion of its main current issues, and an indication of its emergent debates and future trajectory. Chapters conclude with a list of related topics in the Handbook. Bibliographical references appear at the end of each chapter, making them self-contained. Finally, each chapter has a section on further reading: a short annotated list of works which readers might consult for a more in-depth treatment of the area. Volume 1 of the Handbook focuses on language learning and language education. It is made of two parts. Part I is on language learning and language education – the historical core of applied linguistics, with the aim of addressing practical problems in language learning and teaching. The new edition includes the topics which have emerged or have seen considerable

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Introduction

development in last few years, such as content and language integrated learning, language learning across the lifespan, English as an additional language, and the topics which were not included in the first edition due to space constraints, such as curriculum and material and language awareness. Part II is on key areas and approaches to applied linguistics. The section foregrounds the range of different conceptualizations and methodological approaches as well as the interdisciplinarity of applied linguistics. Volume 2 also contains two parts and focuses on broader issues beyond language teaching and learning that applied linguists deal with. In Part I, ‘Applied linguistics in society’, new topics include family language policy, critical applied linguistics, digital communication, intercultural communication, institutional discourse, language and race, and politics and applied linguistics. Part II, ‘Broadening horizons’ contains new chapters on language attrition, posthumanism and applied linguistics, linguistic landscapes, endangered languages, ecolinguistics, and translanguaging. The contents of this volume can be found on the Table of Contents pages. The contents of Volume I include the following: Part I: Language learning and language education 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8   9  10 11 12 13 14

Conceptualizing language education: theories and practice – Diane Larsen-Freeman Second and additional language acquisition across the lifespan – Lourdes Ortega Language teaching and methodology – Scott Thornbury Technology and language learning – Richard Kern Teacher communities of practice – Simon Borg Curriculum and materials: decolonization and inclusivity – John Gray Content and language integrated learning and English medium instruction – Heath Rose and Jim McKinley Bilingual and multilingual education – Ingrid Gogolin English for academic purposes – Nigel Harwood and Bojana Petrić Language testing – Barry O’Sullivan Language awareness – Xuesong (Andy) Gao Classroom discourse – Amy B. M. Tsui Language and culture – Claire Kramsch Language socialization – Agnes Weiyun He

Part II: Key areas and approaches in applied linguistics 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

Grammar – Michael Swan Lexis – Joe Barcroft and Gretchen Sunderman Applied phonetics and phonology – Helen Fraser Literacy – Doris S. Warriner Genre analysis – John Flowerdew Stylistics – Elena Semino Discourse analysis – Guy Cook Corpus linguistics – Phoebe Lin and Svenja Adolphs Cognitive linguistics – Bodo Winter and Florent Perek Systemic functional linguistics – Lise Fontaine and Anne McCabe Generative grammar – Shigenori Wakabayashi Psycholinguistics and second language acquisition – John Field

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27 Neurolinguistics in language learning and teaching – John W. Schwieter and Stefano Rastelli 28 Psychology of language learning: personality, emotion, and motivation – Jean-Marc Dewaele 29 Sociocultural approaches to language development – Steven L. Thorne and Thomas Tasker 30 Sociolinguistics for language education – Petros Karatsareas We hope that the new enlarged edition of the Handbook further reflects the scope of contemporary applied linguistics and will stimulate the interests of a new generation of students and researchers in this exciting and diverse field.

References Block, D. and Cameron, D. (eds.) (2001) Globalization and Language Teaching, Oxford: Routledge. Brumfit, C. (1995) ‘Teacher professionalism and research’, in G. Cook and B. Seidlhofer (eds.), Principles and Practice in Applied Linguistics: Studies in Honour of H. G. Widdowson, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 27–41. Kramsch, C. (2015) ‘Applied linguistics: A theory of the practice’, Applied Linguistics, 36(4): 454–465. Li, W. (2018) ‘Translanguaging as a practical theory of language’, Applied Linguistics, 39(1): 9–30.

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Part I

Applied linguistics in society

1 Multilingualism Jasone Cenoz and Durk Gorter

Introduction Nowadays, there are more multilingual than monolingual speakers in the world (Edwards 2019; De Bot 2019). Multilingualism is very common, and the number of existing languages is much larger than the number of independent states. Individuals and whole communities need to speak more than one language for different reasons. In some cases, they are speakers of a minority autochthonous language, such as Navajo in the US, Quechua and Aymara in Peru and Bolivia, Maori in New Zealand, or Welsh in the UK, and need to learn the dominant state language. In other cases, multilingualism is related to immigration because immigrants speak their first language(s) as well as the language(s) of their host countries. Moreover, globalization has spread the use of English all over the world to a greater extent than any other language in the past and English is increasingly used as a lingua franca, along with many other languages. Multilingualism can be understood as an individual or a social phenomenon. It can refer to the acquisition, knowledge, or use of several languages by individuals or by language communities in a specific geographical area. This broad scope is recognized in some definitions such as that of the European Commission ‘the ability of societies, institutions, groups and individuals to engage, on a regular basis, with more than one language in their day-to-day lives’ (European Commission 2007: 6). The term ‘plurilingualism’ is used in some cases to refer to individual multilingualism but the most common term is ‘multilingualism’, both for the individual and social dimensions. Plurilingualism has also been related to a more integrated view of languages in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (Council of Europe 2001), but this integrated view that looks at the whole linguistic repertoire is also associated with the term ‘multilingualism’. Nowadays, multilingualism is widely used to refer to two or more languages, and bilingualism is considered as a variant of multilingualism, which also includes other variants, such as trilingualism. Studies on third or additional language acquisition have focused on the specific characteristics that distinguish multilingualism when it involves more than two languages  (Gabryś-Barker  2019).  Research  in  this  area  shows  that  the  diversity  of  contexts  and the higher complexity of processes involving more than two languages can result in interesting insights. These insights on language acquisition and specific resources used by DOI: 10.4324/9781003082637-3

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multilinguals cannot be found when only two languages are involved (Aronin and Jessner 2015; Quay and Montanari 2019). An important question when discussing multilingualism is what we understand by being multilingual. It is a difficult question to answer because there are different dimensions of multilingualism (Baker and Wright 2021). One of the most important dimensions is proficiency, understood as language competence in the different languages. The idea of ‘native control of two languages’, suggested by Bloomfield (1933), when referring to bilingualism is extremely demanding and very uncommon when more than two languages are involved. As we have already seen, the definition given by the European Commission does not establish a specific level of proficiency in each of the languages in order to be multilingual but refers to the use of the languages on a regular basis. The idea of balanced multilingualism at the level of an ‘ideal educated native speaker’ in several languages is not realistic. Another dimension of multilingualism is related to age. Multilingual speakers can learn two or more languages simultaneously or sequentially at different ages. As Muñoz and Singleton (2019) explain, age can refer to the starting age in which exposure to the language occurs or biological age. They also add that the influence of age is influenced by the specific context of acquisition. Other dimensions of multilingualism include the frequency and purpose of use of the languages in society or their status and typology (see also Festman 2019). An interesting dimension of multilingualism is the distinction between productive and receptive abilities. Lingua receptiva refers to situations in which speakers use different languages but understand each other (ten Thije et al. 2017). Lingua receptiva has a strong tradition in Scandinavia where speakers of a language such as Swedish, Danish, or Norwegian use their respective first languages when communicating with each other because they can understand the languages used by their interlocutors. Lingua receptiva can promote language diversity because speakers only need to understand the language of their interlocutors and do not need to speak it. Multilingualism is related to many areas of applied linguistics and therefore to many other chapters in this volume.

Historical perspectives Multilingualism is not a new phenomenon as it can be seen in ancient texts written in several languages, such as the Behistun Inscription (the sixth or fifth century BC) or the Rosetta Stone (196 BC). Multilingualism was also common in the Roman Empire and in the Middle Ages in many areas of Europe. There are many other examples of multilingualism in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. There have also been strong forces against multilingualism such as European colonialism and the development of nation-states with the idea of ‘one country, one language’. Multilingual individuals have often been praised for their abilities. Several well-known polyglots are Cardinal Giuseppe Caspar Mezzofanti; James Murray, first editor of the English Oxford Dictionary; and Solomon Caesar Malan, a Victorian scholar (see also Edwards 2019). Aronin and Singleton (2008) compared the characteristics of historical and contemporary multilingualism, and they concluded that multilingualism is a more global phenomenon nowadays because its geographical and social spread is wider than in previous times. Cenoz and Gorter (2020a) explain that one of the characteristics of multilingualism nowadays is that, in most cases, it includes the English language.

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Critical issues and topics The study of multilingualism has been approached from different perspectives, such as psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, and education. Different aspects of multilingualism receive more or less attention depending on the discipline. In psycholinguistics, the basic topics are the cognitive outcomes of bilingualism and language processing by multilingual speakers. Sociolinguistic studies on multilingualism have focused on the use of different languages and their interaction in specific contexts, the relationship between language use and identity and the status and vitality of different languages as related to power relationships. Research on education has focused on the use of minority languages as languages of instruction and the learning of second and additional languages in school contexts. Critical issues and topics on multilingualism are relevant for many other areas of applied linguistics, such as language learning, language in education, and language in society. Due to space limitations, only some critical issues in multilingualism will be presented here.

The outcomes of bilingualism and multilingualism Up to the 1960s multilingualism was generally associated with negative results in cognitive ability. Multilingual schoolchildren scored lower than monolinguals, particularly in verbal intelligence, but these tests often had serious methodological problems. The multilingual children tested in these studies were in contexts in which their first language was regarded as inferior in society and was not developed at school. Moreover, multilingual children often came from lower socioeconomic backgrounds than monolingual children. This idea of associating multilingualism with detrimental effects in cognitive ability changed in the following decades. A very influential study was published by Peal and Lambert in 1962. This study proved that bilingual children scored higher on several verbal and non-verbal tests of cognitive ability. Although some methodological aspects of this study have been criticized, it triggered off a large number of methodologically stronger studies on the effects of bilingualism. In contrast to the studies conducted between the 1920s and the 1960s, studies carried out in recent decades have generally associated bilingualism with cognitive advantages in executive control and third language acquisition. Research on the outcomes of bilingualism shows that bilinguals have advantages in some areas of non-verbal executive control and that they could be related to the high levels of control of attention (Bialystok 2010). Results also indicated that bilingualism could possibly slow down the process of cognitive decline (Bialystok et al. 2004). However, the advantage shown by bilinguals in general executive functioning has been criticized in recent years, and some methodological issues have been pointed out (see, for example, Paap 2019). Bilingualism and multilingualism have been associated with possible advantages in the acquisition of additional languages (see Cenoz 2013; Jessner and Cenoz 2019). The basic idea is that monolinguals and multilinguals are not on equal footing when facing the task of acquiring an additional language. Multilinguals already have access to at least two linguistic systems with their lexicons, syntax, phonetics, pragmatics, and discourse properties. Moreover, with the exception of early bi-/multilinguals, multilingual learners have already the experience of acquiring a second or third language and have developed strategies that can influence the acquisition of additional languages. Metalinguistic awareness refers to the ability to reflect on language and to manipulate it. Bilinguals have been reported to have advantages over monolinguals in some dimensions of metalinguistic awareness and that this could have some influence

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on the acquisition of additional languages (Woll 2018). Communication practices are also different when comparing monolinguals and multilinguals because the latter need to switch between languages according to the situation or the interlocutor. The positive effect of bilingualism on the acquisition of additional languages is not so obvious in the case of immigrants when the first language is not taught and valued at school or in society (Jiménez Catalán and Fernández Fontecha 2019). In these cases, learners can be in situations in which they do not have the opportunity to develop their first language at school and to benefit from the enhanced metalinguistic skills associated with multilingualism. Furthermore, in many cases immigrant children come from weaker socioeconomic and socioeducational backgrounds which are usually associated with poorer school achievement. Some studies have reported that the advantages associated with bilingualism in L3 acquisition are linked to proficiency in the first or second language (Edele et al. 2018; Maluch and Kempert 2019).

Multilingualism, language planning, and education Language planning is understood as a type of intervention into the corpus of a language, its status and acquisition. The institution of education can be regarded as a crucial tool of language planning. Schools can have an important influence on language learning but also on the status and values associated with different languages. In fact, schools have been regarded as spaces where ‘specific languages and specific linguistic practices come to be inculcated with legitimacy and authority’ (Martin-Jones 2007: 172). Some European minority languages, such as Basque, Catalan, or Welsh, are good examples of the effect of language planning (Gorter et al. 2014). These languages were neglected or even forbidden to be used in educational contexts, but over the last decades, rather elaborate systems have developed for the teaching of the minority language from the earliest stages of education until university and adult education. Nowadays, not only home or first language (L1) speakers of a minority language have it as the language of instruction but also speakers of the majority language learn through the minority language at school. In some schools, such as those in the Basque Country, there is a shift from bilingualism to multilingualism and English is being increasingly used as an additional language of instruction. Basque, the minority language, is the main language of instruction and English is an additional language of instruction in some schools (Gorter et al. 2014). Multilingual education not only implies the teaching is in two or more languages but also that education aims at multilingualism and multiliteracy as an outcome. There are different types of bilingual and multilingual education, depending not only on school variables (teachers, curriculum, etc.) but also on the sociolinguistic context in which the schools are located and the language policy of that society (see Cenoz and Gorter 2019). The values associated with different languages and their prestige in society are closely related to multilingual education. For example, the strong language policy to protect Basque in the Basque Country is not only aimed at schools but also at the use of Basque in government agencies, town halls, private companies, and the linguistic landscape. This situation is completely different from that of immigrant languages in the Basque Country or elsewhere. Immigrant languages are often seen as obstacles to integration (Yagmur 2016).

Current contributions and research In this section, we will focus on three new areas of development in research on multilingualism: the multilingual turn, translanguaging, and the linguistic landscape. 10

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The multilingual turn Traditionally, monolingualism has been the reference even in the study of multilingualism or in educational contexts aiming at the development of students’ multilingualism. Multilingual speakers’ proficiency has been measured by comparison to the proficiency of educated native speakers of each of the languages involved, and the focus has been only on one of the languages at a time. These monolingual views also imply that languages have to be isolated so that they do not contaminate each other. Another implication associated with monolingual views is that balanced multilingualism with equal high proficiency in different languages should be achieved (Cenoz 2019). Monolingual views and ideologies of language separation have been criticized, and a multilingual turn is replacing them by multilingual views that are based on the way multilingual speakers use languages in communication (May 2014; Conteh and Meier 2014; Cummins 2017; Cenoz and Gorter 2020a). These multilingual views consider that boundaries between languages are soft and fluid, and multilingual speakers do not isolate their languages. Multilingual views include different proposals. One of these proposals is to focus on multilingualism, which links the way multilingual speakers use their communicative resources to the teaching and learning of languages at school (Cenoz and Gorter 2015, 2020a). The dimensions of focusing on multilingualism are the multilingual speaker, the whole linguistic repertoire, and the social context. The multilingual speaker dimension considers that the multilingual speaker is a different type of speaker when compared to the monolingual native speaker because multilingual speakers use different linguistic resources. Therefore, multilinguals should not be compared to monolinguals because they are not the sum of several monolingual speakers (see also Pennycook and Makoni 2020). The second dimension, the whole linguistic repertoire, highlights the need to focus on multilingualism because multilingual speakers link new knowledge to existing knowledge and use resources from all their languages when learning and using languages. The third dimension of focusing on multilingualism is the social context. Multilingual speakers engage in social practices to learn and use languages. Multilingual speakers have the resources in their multilingual repertoire, but they use them in different ways depending on their interlocutors, and they contribute to shaping the communicative context.

Translanguaging The term ‘translanguaging’ was first used in the context of bilingual education in Wales to refer to the pedagogical practice that alternates the use of Welsh and English for the input and the output during the same lesson (Lewis et al. 2012). The aim of translanguaging in the Welsh context is to develop both language and academic skills. Nowadays, translanguaging is widely used in different contexts and it can be regarded as ‘an umbrella term that embraces a wide variety of theoretical and practical proposals’ (Cenoz and Gorter 2020b: 2). The original concept of translanguaging has been extended to refer to the discursive practices that bilingual speakers use both at school and elsewhere (García 2009; García and Li 2014). Li (2018) considers that translanguaging is natural and refers to a ‘translanguaging instinct’. The legitimization of translanguaging practices in school contexts is linked to social justice and the empowerment of minoritized students (García and Li 2014). Cenoz and Gorter (2020b) represent translanguaging on a continuum with two ends: pedagogical and spontaneous translanguaging. Pedagogical translanguaging is close to the original concept of translanguaging and refers to a theory and practice that integrates two or more languages. Pedagogical translanguaging relates prior knowledge to new knowledge and uses 11

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resources from the multilingual speakers’ repertoire to develop language and content skills. The integration of different languages can be done by alternating the languages of the input and the output but also by working on the development of metalinguistic awareness across languages and the coordination of teachers of different languages and language and content teachers (Cenoz and Gorter 2021). Spontaneous translanguaging occurs naturally, and it is widely used by multilingual speakers. There are different approaches to translanguaging and different theoretical distinctions as well. One of the main issues is the way scholars position themselves regarding the existence of languages (Leung and Valdés 2019). Some scholars consider that the boundaries between languages can only be defined socially or politically because there is a single linguistic repertoire understood as a single aggregation of lexical and structural resources (García and Otheguy 2020: 25). Other scholars consider that there is no scientific evidence to claim that languages do not exist and that it is counterintuitive (MacSwan 2017; Cummins 2021). Some scholars also point out that scholars who do not assume the existence of languages still refer to individual languages (Berthele 2021).

Linguistic landscape The study of the linguistic landscape as a field in its own right is a relatively recent development in applied linguistics and sociolinguistics, although there is a long tradition in the analysis of the meaning of signs in semiotics. The study of the linguistic landscape, also referred to as semiotic landscape, can be a way to increase our understanding of different aspects of multilingualism (Gorter 2013, 2019). The focus of linguistic landscape studies is on ‘written languages in public spaces’ but from its inception there has been an important expansion beyond a narrow definition to include images, multimodal dimensions, placement of objects, and how people interact with signage (Shohamy 2019). An alternative definition could be ‘the configuration of language choices on public signage in multilingual settings’ (Matras et al. 2018: 53). Studies on linguistic landscapes conducted in various settings show the cultural and linguistic diversity in the use of different languages. In a classical study, Ben Rafael et al. (2006) compared Jewish, Israeli Palestinian, and non-Israeli Palestinian settings in Israel. They report on the use of Hebrew, Arabic, and English in Jewish and non-Israeli Palestinian locations. The use of different languages on the signs is also reported in numerous studies conducted in cities, towns, and rural areas around the world. An overview of those studies linked to multilingualism can be found in Shohamy (2012), Van Mensel et al. (2016) and Gorter and Cenoz (2017). Apart from multilingualism, another trend observed in these studies is the spread of English in the linguistic landscape. In some cases, the use of English in commercial signs could be interpreted as informative when it is aimed at foreign visitors in non-English-speaking countries, but at the same time, it is clear that English has a strong symbolic function for the local population. The global use of English, especially in advertising, has been associated with values and perceptions such as modernity, success, and internationalness (Hornikx and Van Meurs 2020). The development of multilingual landscapes is also closely linked to language policy (Spolsky 2009). For example, Cenoz and Gorter (2006) compared two European bilingual cities, Donostia-San Sebastian in the Basque Country (Spain) and Ljouwert-Leeuwarden in Friesland (The Netherlands). The official languages are Basque and Spanish in the Basque Country and Frisian and Dutch in Friesland. Basque and Frisian are minority languages, but the institutional support for Basque is much stronger than for Frisian and the linguistic landscape is one of the areas where Basque is much more strongly promoted than Frisian. Gorter et al. (2012) 12

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confirmed that the local language policy had an important impact on the linguistic landscape. The conflict over of the French language in Canada, particularly in Québec, is a renowned example for the development of language policy in relation to the study of linguistic landscapes (Leimgruber 2019). Another widely known example is the legal arrangement for Dutch and French in Belgium, which divides the country into two monolingual territories, with the exception of the officially bilingual capital, Brussels. Local language policy dictates strict equality of Dutch and French on official signage, whereas on private signage is left unregulated (Janssens 2012). Similar influences of language policy were also found in studies in such diverse locations as the bilingual community of Galicia, Spain (Dunlevy 2012), and in Guangzhou, one of the largest cities in China (Han and Wu 2020), and in studies on Indigenous languages in a small town in the Amazon region in Brazil (Shulist 2018). The study of the linguistic landscape can thus contribute to the study of multilingualism in different ways. Language signs are indicators of the status and prestige of languages used in a specific setting and the signs can also be an additional source of input in language acquisition (Cenoz and Gorter 2008; Li and Marshall 2020). An area of research that has become increasingly important is the analysis of linguistic landscapes inside schools and other educational contexts as related to language teaching and multilingualism (Gorter 2018; Krompák et al. 2022; Malinowski et al. 2020; Niedt and Seals 2020).

Recommendations for practice The main recommendation for practice regarding multilingualism is to focus on multilingualism taking a multilingual turn or using a multilingual lens (May 2014; Conteh and Meier 2014; Cummins 2017; Cenoz and Gorter 2020a) This recommendation applies to research, language policy, and teaching. There is now a growing body of research on multilingualism, and it is necessary for research to take a more holistic approach considering multilingual speakers and their whole linguistic repertoire instead of isolating and focusing only on one language at a time. Studies on the acquisition and use of three or more languages has been a big step because they analyze the differences between second and third language acquisition and analyze the effect of previously acquired languages (Jessner and Cenoz 2019). However, it is necessary that research in these areas adopt a more multilingual lens by looking at the whole multilingual repertoire and the way it is used by multilingual speakers. Another important point regarding research is to consider that multilingual speakers use languages in different contexts, and they cannot be compared to monolingual speakers, who use only one language in all contexts. The same recommendation to focus on multilingualism can apply to policy-makers in education. All languages in the students’ multilingual repertoires need to be valued even if they are not part of the curriculum. As Duarte and Kirsch (2020) point out, it is often the case that immigrant and minority languages are not taught at school, and this can have negative consequences for students and their learning process. An important issue is the assessment of multilingual learners. In the context of Europe, De Backer et al. (2017) explain that immigrants with a home language that is not part of the curriculum often take language and content tests in a language they do not know well. In these contexts, immigrant students tend to obtain lower results in tests designed from a monolingual perspective. It is necessary to approach assessment from a multilingual lens, considering the needs these multilingual students have. Immigrant students can benefit from a multilingual approach that gives value to their languages and provides linguistic support using translanguaging (Slembrouck et al. 2018). Another step in this direction 13

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in relation to language assessment is the Council of Europe’s (2018) new criteria for building a plurilingual repertoire and for plurilingual comprehension. The same recommendation about focusing on multilingualism applies to teaching. Pedagogical translanguaging strategies can be a useful way to activate resources from the multilingual students’ whole repertoire and positively influence language and content learning (Cenoz and Gorter 2021). Moreover, students’ social, multilingual, and multicultural identities can be validated when multilingual students use resources from all their languages (see also Norton 2014).

Future directions Multilingualism is a very broad area, and there are many possible future directions. In this chapter we have only looked at some of them. As has already been said, there is a strong trend towards adopting a real focus on multilingualism or a multilingual lens in the study and practice of multilingualism. Another important trend is the awareness of social inequalities and the way there is a hierarchy of languages because there are important differences in the status of speakers. Multilingual practices such as spontaneous translanguaging can be seen as related to social justice and legitimization of the way minoritized speakers communicate (García and Li 2014). A related direction in the study of multilingualism is the relationship between language, race, and social class (Rosa 2018). This area, also referred to as raciolinguistics, has important implications for educational settings because it goes against standard languages, which are the varieties that are used as a model in most schools. Another future direction is related to pedagogical translanguaging and its influence on the development of language and content skills in education. Now that boundaries between languages are regarded as soft and fluid, it is important to see the effect of specific strategies that use resources from the whole multilingual repertoire in order to link new knowledge to prior knowledge. Some results indicate that pedagogical translanguaging can have a positive influence on the acquisition of vocabulary (see, for example, Leonet et al. 2020). More studies are necessary to evaluate the specific influence of pedagogical translanguaging because there is a wide range of practices that can be considered as pedagogical translanguaging that can be applied at different ages and in different contexts.

Related topics conceptualizing language learning and language education: theories and methods; second and additional language acquisition across the lifespan; bilingual and multilingual education; language and ageing; linguistic landscape; minority/Indigenous language revitalization; languaging and translanguaging

Further reading Baker, C. and Wright, W. E. (2021) Foundations of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 7th ed., Bristol: Multilingual Matters. (This volume is probably the most comprehensive overview of the characteristics, types, and outcomes of bilingualism and bilingual education. The volume looks at individual, social, and educational aspects of bilingualism and multilingualism.) Cenoz, J. and Gorter, D. (2021) Pedagogical Translanguaging, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (This volume focuses on pedagogical translanguaging, understood as a theoretical and instructional approach that aims at improving language by using resources from the learner’s multilingual repertoire. Pedagogical translanguaging, which is close to the original use of translanguaging in Welsh-English bilingual schools, can be used in language and content classes.) 14

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García, O. and Li, W. (2014) Translanguaging: Language, Bilingualism and Education, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. (This volume focuses on the definition and scope of translanguaging as theory and practice. The volume also looks at translanguaging pedagogies in multilingual classroom contexts. The transformative potential of translanguaging in education is highlighted, as well as its orientation towards social justice.) Pennycook, A. and Makoni, S. (2020) Innovations and Challenges in Applied Linguistics from the Global South, New York: Routledge. (This volume looks at the Global South as linked to marginalized people in post- and de-colonial areas. Pennycook and Makoni view languages as invented social constructs and they adopt an integrational approach to multilingualism that goes against plural monolingualisms.) Van Avermaet, P., Slembrouck, S., Van Gorp, K., Sierens, S. and Maryns, K. (eds.) (2018) The Multilingual Edge in Education, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. (This edited volume highlights the role of minority students’ multilingual repertoires in different school context in Africa, Europe, and North America. The establishment of integrated multilingual contexts in heterogeneous classrooms makes them more equitable and efficient.)

References Aronin, L. and Jessner, U. (2015) ‘Understanding current multilingualism: What can the butterfly tell us?’, in U. Jessner and C. Kramsch (eds.) The Multilingual Challenge: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 271–291. Aronin, L. and Singleton, D. (2008) ‘Multilingualism as a new linguistic dispensation’, International Journal of Multilingualism, 5: 1–16. Baker, C. and Wright, E. (2021) Foundations of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 7th ed., Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Ben Rafael, E., Shohamy, E., Amara, M. H. and Trumper-Hecht, N. (2006) ‘Linguistic landscape as symbolic construction of the public space: The case of Israel’, in D. Gorter (ed.), Linguistic Landscape: A New Approach to Multilingualism, Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, pp. 7–28. Berthele, R. (2021) ‘The extraordinary ordinary: Re-engineering multilingualism as a natural category’, Language Learning, 71: 80–120. Bialystok, E. (2010) ‘Bilingualism’, Cognitive Science, 1: 559–572. Bialystok, E., Craik, F. I., Klein, R. and Viswanathan, M. (2004) ‘Bilingualism, aging, and cognitive control: Evidence from the Simon Task’, Psychology and Aging, 19: 290–303. Bloomfield, L. (1933) Language, New York: Holt. Cenoz, J. (2013) ‘The influence of bilingualism on third language acquisition: Focus on multilingualism’, Language Teaching, 46: 71–86. Cenoz, J. (2019) ‘Translanguaging pedagogies and English as a lingua franca’, Language Teaching, 52: 71–85. Cenoz, J. and Gorter, D. (2006) ‘Linguistic landscape and minority languages’, in D. Gorter (ed.), Linguistic Landscape: A New Approach to Multilingualism, Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, pp. 67–80. Cenoz, J. and Gorter, D. (2008) ‘Linguistic landscape as an additional source of input in second language acquisition’, IRAL, International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching, 46: 257–276. Cenoz, J. and Gorter, D. (2015) ‘Towards a holistic approach in the study of multilingual education’, in J. Cenoz and D. Gorter (eds.), Multilingual Education: Between Language Learning and Translanguaging, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–15. Cenoz, J. and Gorter, D. (2019) ‘Educational policy and multilingualism’, in D. Singleton and L. Aronin (eds.), Twelve Lectures on Multilingualism, Bristol: Multilingual Matters, pp. 101–132. Cenoz, J. and Gorter, D. (2020a) ‘Teaching English through pedagogical translanguaging: Breaking away from monolingual ideologies’, World Englishes, 39: 300–311. Cenoz, J. and Gorter, D. (2020b) ‘Pedagogical translanguaging: An introduction’, System, 92. Cenoz, J. and Gorter, D. (2021) Pedagogical Translanguaging, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Conteh, J. and Meier, G. (eds.) (2014) The Multilingual Turn in Languages Education: Opportunities and Challenges, Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Council of Europe (2001) Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. www.coe.int/t/dg4/Linguistic/Source/ Framework_EN.pdf 15

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Council of Europe (2018) Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment: Companion Volume with New Descriptors, Strasbourg: Council of Europe. https:// rm.coe.int/cefr-companionvolumewith-new-descriptors-2018/1680787989 Cummins, J. (2017) ‘Teaching for transfer inmultilingual school contexts’, in O. García, A. Lin and S. May (eds.), Bilingual Education: Encyclopedia of Language and Education, Berlin: Springer, pp. 103–115. Cummins, J. (2021) ‘Translanguaging: A critical analysis of theoretical claims’, in P. Juvonen and M. Källkvist (eds.), Pedagogical Translanguaging: Theoretical, Methodological and Empirical Perspectives, Bristol: Multilingual Matters. De Backer, F., Van Avermaet, P. and Slembrouck, S. (2017) ‘Schools as laboratories for exploring multilingual assessment policies and practices’, Language and Education, 31: 217–230. De Bot, K. (2019) ‘Defining and assessing multilingualism’, in J. W. Schwieter (ed.), The Handbook of the Neuroscience of Multilingualism, Hoboken: John Wiley, pp. 3–18. Duarte, J. and Kirsch, C. (2020) ‘Introduction: Multilingual approaches to teaching and learning’, in C. Kirsch and J. Duarte (eds.), Multilingual Approaches for Teaching and Learning: From Acknowledging to Capitalising on Multilingualism in European Mainstream Education, New York: Routledge, pp. 1–12. Dunlevy, D. A. (2012) ‘Linguistic policy and linguistic choice: A study of the Galician linguistic landscape’, in C. Helot, M. Barni, R. Janssens and C. Bagna (eds.), Linguistic Landscape, Multilingualism and Social Change, Frankfurt: Peter Lang, pp. 53–68. Edele, A., Kempert, S. and Schotte, K. (2018) ‘Does competent bilingualism entail advantages for the third language learning of immigrant students?’, Learning and Instruction, 58: 232–244. Edwards, J. (2019) ‘Multilingual individuals’, in D. Singleton and L. Aronin (eds.), Twelve Lectures on Multilingualism, Bristol: Multilingual Matters, pp. 135–162. European Commission (2007) Final Report: High Level Group on Multilingualism. http://ec.europa.eu/ education/policies/lang/doc/multireport_en.pdf Festman, J. (2019) ‘The psycholinguistics of multilingualism’, in D. Singleton and L. Aronin (eds.), Twelve Lectures on Multilingualism, Bristol: Multilingual Matters, pp. 233–267. Gabryś-Barker, D. (2019) ‘Applied linguistics and multilingualism’, in D. Singleton and L. Aronin (eds.),  Twelve Lectures on Multilingualism, Bristol: Multilingual Matters, pp. 35–64. García, O. (2009) Bilingual Education in the 21st Century: A Global Perspective, Chichester, UK: WileyBlackwell. García, O. and Li, W. (2014) Translanguaging: Language, Bilingualism and Education, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. García, O. and Otheguy, R. (2020) ‘Plurilingualism and translanguaging: Commonalities and divergences’, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 23: 17–35. Gorter, D. (2013) ‘Linguistic landscapes in a multilingual world’, ARAL: Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 33: 190–212. Gorter, D. (2018) ‘Linguistic landscape and trends in the study of schoolscapes’, Linguistics and Education, 44: 80–85. Gorter, D. (2019) ‘Language contact in the linguistic landscape’, in J. Darquennes, J. Salmons and W. Vandenbussche (eds.), Language Contact: An International Handbook, Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, pp. 429–439. Gorter, D., Aiestaran, J. and Cenoz, J. (2012) ‘The revitalization of Basque and the linguistic landscape of Donostia-San Sebastián’, in D. Gorter, H. F. Marten and L. Van Mensel (eds.), Minority Languages in the Linguistic Landscape, Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan, pp. 148–163. Gorter, D. and Cenoz, J. (2017) ‘Linguistic landscape and multilingualism’, in J. Cenoz, D. Gorter and S. May (eds.), Language Awareness and Multilingualism, Cham: Springer, pp. 233–245. Gorter, D., Zenotz, V., Etxague, X. and Cenoz, J. (2014) ‘Multilingualism and European minority languages: The case of Basque’, in D. Gorter, V. Zenotz and J. Cenoz (eds.), Minority Languages and Multilingual Education: Bridging the Local and the Global, Berlin: Springer, pp. 278–301. Han, Y. and Wu, X. (2020) ‘Language policy, linguistic landscape and residents’ perception in Guangzhou, China: Dissents and conflicts’, Current Issues in Language Planning, 21: 229–253. Hornikx, J. and Van Meurs, F. (2020) Foreign Languages in Advertising: Linguistic and Marketing Perspectives, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Janssens, R. (2012) ‘The linguistic landscape as a political arena: The case of the Brussels periphery in Belgium’, in C. Hélot, M. Barni, R. Janssens and C. Bagna (eds.), Linguistic Landscapes, Multilingualism and Social Change, Frankfurt: Peter Lang, pp. 39–52.

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Jessner, U. and Cenoz, J. (2019) ‘Teaching English as a third language’, in X. Gao (ed.), Second Handbook of English Language Teaching, Berlin: Springer, pp. 155–172. Jiménez Catalán, R. M. and Fernández Fontecha, A. (2019) ‘Lexical availability output in L2 and L3 EFL learners: Is there a difference?’, English Language Teaching, 1: 77–87. Krompák, E., Fernandez, V. and Meyer, S. (eds.) (2022) The Linguistic Landscape and Educational Spaces, Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Leimgruber, J. R. E. (2019) ‘Montreal’s linguistic landscape: Instances of top-down and bottom-up language planning’, in M. Castillo Lluch, R. Kailuweit and C. D. Pusch (eds.), Linguistic Landscape Studies: The French Connection, Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, pp. 163–174. Leonet, O., Cenoz, J. and Gorter, D. (2020) ‘Developing morphological awareness across languages: Translanguaging pedagogies in third language acquisition’, Language Awareness, 29: 41–59. Leung, C. and Valdés, G. (2019) ‘Translanguaging and the transdisciplinary framework for language teaching and learning in a multilingual world’, The Modern Language Journal, 103: 348–370. Lewis, G., Jones, B. and Baker, C. (2012) ‘Translanguaging: Origins and development from school to street and beyond’, Educational Research and Evaluation: An International Journal on Theory and Practice, 18: 641–654. Li, J. and Marshall, S. (2020) ‘Engaging with linguistic landscaping in Vancouver’s Chinatown: A pedagogical tool for teaching and learning about multilingualism’, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 23: 925–941. Li, W. (2018) ‘Translanguaging as a practical theory of language’, Applied Linguistics, 39: 9–30. MacSwan, J. (2017) ‘A multilingual perspective on translanguaging’, American Educational Research Journal, 54: 167–201. Malinowski, D., Maxim, H. H. and Dubreil, S. (2020) Language Teaching in the Linguistic Landscape: Mobilizing Pedagogy in Public Space, Berlin: Springer. Maluch, J. T. and Kempert, S. (2019) ‘Bilingual profiles and third language learning: The effects of the manner of learning, sequence of bilingual acquisition, and language use practices’, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 22: 870–882. Martin-Jones, M. (2007) ‘Bilingualism, education and the regulation of access to language resources’, in M. Heller (ed.), Bilingualism: A Social Approach, London: Palgrave, pp. 161–182. Matras, Y., Gaiser, L. and Reershemius, G. (2018) ‘Multilingual repertoire management and illocutionary functions in Yiddish signage in Manchester’, Journal of Pragmatics, 135: 53–70. May, S. (ed.) (2014) The Multilingual Turn: Implications for SLA, TESOL, and Bilingual Education, New York: Routledge. Muñoz, C. and Singleton, D. (2019) ‘Age and multilingualism’, in D. Singleton and L. Aronin (eds.), Twelve Lectures on Multilingualism, Bristol: Multilingual Matters, pp. 213–230. Niedt, G. and Seals, C. (eds.) (2020) Linguistic Landscape Beyond the Classroom, London: Bloomsbury. Norton, B. (2014) ‘Identity, literacy and the multilingual classroom’, in S. May (ed.), The Multilingual Turn: Implications for SLA, TESOL and Bilingual Education, New York: Routledge, pp. 103–122. Paap, K. R. (2019) ‘The bilingual advantage debate: Quantity and quality of the evidence’, in J. W. Schwieter (ed.), The Handbook of the Neuroscience of Multilingualism, Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 701–735. Pennycook, A. and Makoni, S. (2020) Innovations and Challenges in Applied Linguistics from the Global South, New York: Routledge. Rosa, J. (2018) Looking Like a Language, Sounding Like a Race: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and the Learning of Latinidad, New York: Oxford University Press. Quay, S. and Montanari, S. (2019) ‘Bilingualism and multilingualism’, in A. De Houwer and L. Ortega (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Bilingualism, Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, pp. 544–560. Shohamy, E. (2012) ‘Linguistic landscapes and multilingualism’, in M. Martin-Jones, A. Blackledge and A. Creese (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Multilingualism, New York: Routledge, pp. 538–551. Shohamy, E. (2019) ‘Linguistic landscape after a decade: An overview of themes, debates and future directions’, in M. Pütz and N. Mundt (eds.), Expanding the Linguistic Landscape: Multilingualism, Language Policy and the Use of Space as a Semiotic Resource, Bristol: Multilingual Matters, pp. 25–37. Shulist, S. (2018) ‘Signs of status: Language policy, revitalization, and visibility in urban Amazonia’, Language Policy, 17: 523–543.

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Slembrouck, S., Van Avermaet, P. and Van Gorp, K. (2018) ‘Strategies of multilingualism in education for minority children’, in P. Van Avermaet, S. Slembrouck, K. Van Gorp, S. Sierens and K. Maryns (eds.), The Multilingual Edge in Education, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 9–39. Spolsky, B. (2009) Language Management, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ten Thije, J. D., Gooskens, C., Daems, F., Cornips, L. and Smits, M. (2017) ‘Lingua receptiva: Position paper on the European commission’s skills agenda’, European Journal of Applied Linguistics, 5: 141–146. Van Mensel, L., Vandenbroucke, M. and Blackwood, R. (2016) ‘Linguistic landscapes’, in O. García, N. Flores and M. Spotti (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Language and Society, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 423–449. Woll, N. (2018) ‘Investigating dimensions of metalinguistic awareness: What think-aloud protocols revealed about the cognitive processes involved in positive transfer from L2 to L3’, Language Awareness, 27: 167–185. Yagmur, K. (2016) ‘Multilingualism in immigrant communities’, in J. Cenoz, D. Gorter and S. May (eds.), Language Awareness and Multilingualism, Encyclopedia of Language and Education, Cham: Springer, pp. 1–15.

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2 Language and migration Mike Baynham and James Simpson

Introduction The multilingual landscapes of the 21st century are a product of continuing transnational and translocal mobility and exchange of people, information, and products across physical and virtual boundaries. Knowledge of local and global/international languages gives access to information, facilitates the exchange of material goods, and enables communication with people in our immediate social space and beyond (Castells 2000). Languages themselves migrate or are remade through migration. Within this context of linguistic superdiversity (Vertovec 2007; Creese and Blackledge 2018), language plays a key role in the constitution of public and private institutions and is crucial for actors who come into contact with these institutions to gain access to material and symbolic resources. Across these multilingual landscapes of mobility and exchange there has of late been a closing down, materially and in public discourse, particularly in the media and in the political sphere. Here, migration is increasingly viewed through the lenses of nationalist and racist rhetoric, creating atmospheres of social panic in which migrants and refugees are seen as threatening national borders (Rheindorf and Wodak 2020). Applied linguistic research aims to increase our understanding of the linguistic dimensions of migration and the subtle ways that language ideologies and practices contribute to social processes of ‘othering’ and exclusion in crucial institutional contexts. It investigates such processes while remaining attuned to large-scale social processes (political, policy-oriented, and institutional); its analyses offer an emic perspective on these movements of human beings rather than their objectivist othering in nationalist or racist discourses. Applied linguistic research into language and migration is based on two simple, interrelated, but far-reaching propositions: (1) for migrants, access to the crucial material and symbolic resources that enable survival and integration is mediated through repeated face-to-face interactions with institutions, and (2) these face-to-face interactions are significantly shaped by changing policy environments and institutional arrangements as well as sometimes volatile national political and media attitudes towards diversity, integration, citizenship, and accompanying ideologies concerning who should have access to what resources and how. These face-to-face institutional encounters are normally realized through language. Such face-to-face DOI: 10.4324/9781003082637-4

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encounters, typically characterized by asymmetries of power between participants, are the empirical focus of the applied linguistic study of language and migration, along with representations of them in media, political, and popular discourses. Avoiding methodological nationalism (Glick-Schiller 2010), an applied linguistic research agenda on language and migration investigates how language practices in domains such as health, education, the law, and work are shaped both by the dynamics of face-to-face encounters and the constraints of the surrounding political, policy, and institutional environment; they ask the following questions: What linguistic factors enable and constrain access for migrants (for example, to health services, education, legal advice, or employment)? What languages and forms of communication get used, and when, why, and where? And what are the consequences for the migrant?

Development of the field of language and migration studies Language and migration research has been influenced by the dynamics of globalization (Collins et al. 2009). Emerging sociolinguistic agendas, rather than focusing on the sociolinguistic description of settled communities, have developed into a sociolinguistics of movement and flows and what Pratt terms ‘contact zones’ (Pratt 1987: 60; Mezzadra and Neilson 2013). Another influence on language and migration studies has been work on institutional discourse (Duchêne et al. 2013). Migration trajectories have been characterized as repeated series of institutional encounters, mediated through talk, which can gatekeep access to resources, forming powerful means of exclusion and othering. Such research points to deeply embedded inequalities in power/knowledge, played out in daily encounters with teachers, social workers, migration lawyers and others (Piller 2016). The default sociolinguistic context for language and migration studies is multilingualism, even in national and institutional settings where powerful social forces equate migration with giving up a language in favour of the language of the country of settlement. This is not of course to deny the significance of such linguistic ideological issues, currently brought to the fore in debates around citizenship and political belonging (Cooke and Peutrell 2019). So if the influences in language and migration studies have been largely sociolinguistic, what applied linguistic agendas have emerged? Language learning and teaching, interpreting and translating, doctor-patient interactions, and job interviews and other institutional encounters are not exactly new in themselves, while emerging themes, such as the impact of new policies on citizenship and exclusion, also claim the attention of applied linguists. What is new is the bringing together of these disparate topics into a coherent theme, permitting their interlinking and articulation as part of general processes of migration and population flow. Language and migration thus provide a powerful integrating theme for applied linguistic research.

A framework for applied linguistic research into language and migration An applied linguistic research agenda on language and migration might investigate • • •

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the linguistic ideological influences on migration policies at global, regional, national, and local levels; the discursive construction of migration processes and migrants in the media and in creative practice; the dominant and popular discourses on migration, as well as the investigation of migration processes ‘from the inside’, such as through narrative and life history;

Language and migration

• •

• •

the linguistic aspects of migration trajectories and the opening up of diasporic spaces; key ‘sites of institutional encounter’, such as work, health and social welfare, education, and the law, both ethnographically and using tools for the analysis of language interaction (including mediated interaction of different kinds) and document analysis drawn from linguistic ethnography, CA, CDA and literacy studies; the social processes leading through categorization to exclusion and the operation of power in institutional encounters; and the role of digital media in reshaping diasporic space through the compression of space-time.

While retaining its linguistic focus, such a research agenda is alert to the work on migration in fields such as sociology, anthropology, cultural geography, and political science for the description of large-scale phenomena that shape and influence migration flows and diasporic settlements. The following sections review research in relation to these themes, identifying emergent topics and directions for future work.

Public policy, language ideology, and the law Language issues concerning migration gain an explicit place in public policy at national level in times of perceived crisis. Post–World War II assimilationism gave way in the 1970s and 1980s to policies which emphasized to varying degrees cultural and linguistic diversity and inclusion. Progressive refocusing of national policy in the neoliberal political contexts through the 1990s shifted the emphasis away from linguistic diversity onto the mobilization of human capital through literacy and the acquisition of fluency in the dominant language of society. This is at the expense of diasporic linguistic diversity, apart from those languages which could be linked with economic benefits (Duchêne et al. 2013). The 21st century has seen a continuing profound shift away from policies informed primarily by diversity and inclusion to those highlighting citizenship and settlement in the context of social cohesion. As Cooke and Peutrell say with reference to the UK (2019: 1): levels of English competence in migrant communities have been central to debates about citizenship, community cohesion, integration, segregation, unemployment and extremism, and the rhetoric of politicians has remained similar across changes in government. A strand of research examines the linguistic ideologies (Schieffelin et al. 1998; Irvine and Gal 2000) which inform language testing policies for citizenship and language requirements for immigration introduced since the 1990s. Piller (2001) looks at the interrelationship of ideologies of national and linguistic identity in Germany and their impact on ideologies of citizenship using the case of the introduction of language tests for naturalization. She shows how the linguistic issues posed by migration challenge basic political and moral assumptions of the nation-state. McNamara and Ryan (2011) address the impact of language testing on the citizenship process in Australia, distinguishing between fairness (test quality) and justice – that is, whether the political motivation behind a test is discriminatory. Language is increasingly used as a gatekeeping tool for migration: Loring and Ramanathan (2016) and Simpson (2020) discuss the intertwining of language and immigration law. Harding et al. (2020) examine the Secure English Language Tests used for immigration purposes in the UK, demonstrating how they are part of broader securitization processes under that nation’s so-called ‘hostile environment’ immigration policy. 21

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This research uncovers the web of assumptions about the role of language in the construction and maintenance of the social order. Anxieties concerning migration are, it seems, a special case which triggers the formulation of language-related policy, making explicit what have previously perhaps been tacit though widely held assumptions linking national language(s) with the nation-state.

Language, migration, and media discourse Another strand of the language and migration research agenda concerns the discursive construction of representations of migrants and migration processes in the media and other forms of public discourse (van Dijk 1991). There has been a decisive shift away from traditional print media to online sources (van Hout and Burger 2017), which has blurred the boundaries between consumers and providers of news. Typical research approaches to media texts employ critical discourse analysis (CDA), as, for example, van Leeuwen and Wodak (1999), but also combinations of CDA and corpus linguistics. In a relatively large-scale study (Baker et al. 2008), print media texts were sampled from periods when issues of migration and asylum reached a high profile in the media. Here, CDA and corpus linguistics are combined, the latter tracking the distribution of lexical items and collocates (e.g. ‘looming’ + ‘influx’ in the following example): BRITAIN was warned last night it faces a massive benefits bill to pay for the looming influx of immigrants, including gypsies, from eastern Europe. ( The Express, 9 Feb. 2004, cited in Baker et al. 2008: 286) CDA, with its focus on text structure, is then able to track the discursive patterns of othering that occur in reporting of immigrants and asylum seekers, through identifying textual and intertextual chains of linguistic strategies such as referring and predicating, argumentation, discourse representation, intensification/mitigation, and linking the micro textual detail (which can tell us that there is something negative about the collocation of ‘looming’ + ‘influx’) to ideological macro structures of exclusion. Recent shifts in the media landscape are, however, complex, with a weakening of historically authoritative print media news sources in favour of a less top-down, more rhizomatic circulation of ‘news’ on social media leading to the emergent concept of transmediatization: the circulation of news across a range of social media, through posting and sharing (Fast and Jansson 2019).

Insider perspectives on migration While language ideology and discourse analysis have been used to investigate the representations of migrants and migration in public discourse, narrative and life history methods have been used to investigate ‘from the inside’ the discursive construction of the experience of migration. Themes include migration and space-time orientation in narrative, as well as identity, migration, and agency (see Baynham and de Fina 2016 for a synthesis). This research illustrates the interaction between the different dimensions of the language and migration research agenda identified earlier: language ideology and policy shape the life experiences of narrators, as do their encounters with the institutions of work, schooling, healthcare, and the law. The sharpness of these encounters is best demonstrated in the narratives that make up the institutional encounters themselves, as Maryns’ analysis of asylum-seeking interviews (Maryns 2006) demonstrates. 22

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Migration does not always involve migration across national borders. The linguistic consequences of internal migration in China is a theme in Dong and Blommaert (2009). Liebscher and Dailey-O’Cain (2005) document through narrative the West-East migration movements in the post-1989 reunified Germany. Narratives also chronicle migratory mobility in geopolitical units larger than the nation-state, such as in the expanded European Union in the work of Galasińska  and  Kozłowska  (2009).  Changes  to  EU  legislation,  leading  to  increased  internal  mobility, have emphasized narratives of short-term migration and return. In this context, Meinhof (2009) draws on life history narrative to examine the flows and movements in the migration patterns of Malagasy musicians both within Madagascar and between Madagascar and Europe. An emergent theme in language and migration research concerns the ‘backstory’ of migration: the story of what leads up to the decision to migrate. This is addressed in Juffermans and Tavares’s (2019) research in Cabo Verde and Guinea Bissau. Key themes in this research are the discursive construction of the complex orientations and reorientations that are involved in migration processes and the spatial and temporal dislocations involved. These narratives can be of disempowerment but also of agency and empowerment, of finding a voice as well as losing it. We see clearly the ways that large-scale political and social phenomena shape the interactional worlds of the migrant narrators and the significance of institutional encounters in opening up or closing down opportunities, which will be addressed in more detail in later sections. While contributing substantively to the understanding of migration processes, this research has also contributed to the development of narrative theory, most notably in the way that migration narratives foreground and problematize space in narrative, echoing de Certeau’s claim that ‘every story is a travel story – a spatial practice’ (de Certeau 1988: 115).

Diasporic spaces, multilingual landscapes Influences coming from writers such as de Certeau (1988) and Harvey (1989), from cultural geography and indeed the tradition of neighbourhood studies in urban sociolinguistics, have placed emphasis on how urban spaces are appropriated and made over by migration and diaspora. This is investigated through methods such as linguistic landscaping (Shohamy and Gorter 2009; Blommaert 2013). In their classic literacy ethnography, Gregory and Williams (2000: Chapter 1) show how the Spitalfields area of East London has been appropriated and made over by successive migrations: the Huguenots in the 17th and 18th centuries, the Irish in the early 19th century, the Jews in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and in the mid-20th century, post-Second World War a migration from what is now Bangladesh. In a study of the streetscapes of multilingual neighbourhoods in Ghent as part of a larger multi-sited ethnography of language contact in urban neighbourhoods, Collins and Slembrouck (2007) and Blommaert (2013) examined the constitutive indexical role of multilingual shop signs in creating these interpretative spaces or ‘linguistic landscapes’, involving novel cultural syntheses and blends (businesses that might combine real estate, insurance, accounting, and loans, with more generalized cultural brokering). Similar diasporic spaces were explored by Keating (2009) in her study of the literacy practices of migrant Portuguese women in London. Keating contrasts the migration trajectories of Dina towards hospital work, union activism and community involvement in London and that of Zelia towards work as a legal interpreter based in a driving school business: ‘The driving school was a family-based hybrid setting serving as school, travel agency and community advice centre’ (Keating 2009: 241). It is from this base that Zelia engages in her work of cultural brokering and interpreting. Vigouroux (2009), in her study of an Internet café in Cape 23

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Town as a focal site for the communicative practices of Congolese migrants, identifies a similar multifunctional space, investigating the impact of interacting time-spaces of different scale on the semiotic artefacts and language practices which are characteristic of the Internet café and its various topographical spaces, as well as the indexical relationships produced through these interactions. Sabaté Dalmau (2014) examines similar processes in Barcelona locutorios. Dong Jie’s fieldwork in China (Dong and Blommaert 2009; Dong 2011) shows how a centre/periphery metropolitan/urban/rural dynamic is played out in service encounters in Beijing, where capacity to speak Putonghua has a high value attached. Dong Jie interviews Xiao Xu, a street seller of breakfast dumplings, who demonstrates complex indexical shifts in his repertoire when talking about his work (Dong and Blommaert 2009: 56–57).

Work and enterprise A number of the diasporic spaces described above involved work: Xiao Xu selling breakfast dumplings on a Beijing street, Zelia in her driving school in London, in the multifunctional enterprises of Ghent and Cape Town. Martin-Jones (2000) takes up the notion of ‘enterprising women’ in an ethnographic study of the multilingual literacy practices of Gujarati women in Leicester. The Portuguese women in London in Keating’s study were also enterprising women. Dina, the other subject of Keating (2009), has another employment trajectory, in the unionized public sector workforce. Vigouroux (2013) reports on linguistic differentiation in the informal economy in the case of Congolese migrants in Cape Town, and Blackledge and Creese (2019) present an innovative ethnographic study of language use in a small business, a butchers’ stall in Birmingham, UK, owned by a Chinese couple and catering for people from all over the world. Research into diasporic spaces has tended to identify multilingual literacy practices, oral communicative practices involving language choice, code-switching or code-shifting, or more recently, translanguaging. Piller (2016) usefully summarizes issues of linguistic stratification, subordination, and discrimination in the workplace, also the theme of Duchêne et al. (2013). The research of Roberts (2021) examines employment interviews as gatekeeping devices for migrant applicants, whose education and work experience has been largely out of the UK, identifying a ‘linguistic penalty’ for migrant applicants, weighing against them if their education, training, and work experience has been in their country of origin. Taking another perspective, Lorente (2012) has described the role of the Philippines as a sending country of migrant labour in trying to form the migrant workforce prior to migration, pointing out that the major focus in language and migration research to date has been on issues arising in the country of destination.

Health Applied linguistic research in the area of health relevant to migration has largely focused on intercultural communication and mediation through formal or informal interpreting and cultural brokering (Angelelli 2004). Research has focused unsurprisingly on the medical consultation, emphasizing the role of the interpreter as institutional gatekeeper as well as active partner with the physician in the diagnostic process. The interpreted medical consultation is a salient example of the gatekeeping institutional encounters referred to earlier. From an interactional perspective, the apparently marginal and neutral figure of the interpreter is a powerful broker of access to medical treatment. Applied linguistic issues concern the professionalization of interpreters, reliance on informal interpreting and cultural brokering, the 24

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interactional dynamics of the interpreted interaction, the stance of the interpreter (Inghilleri 2005; Angelelli 2020). Another strategy is to try and optimize the communication possibilities between doctors and patients in contexts where interpreting is not available. Collins and Slembrouck (2006) describe an inner-city health clinic where such issues are addressed through a manual for doctors designed to facilitate communication. The researchers describe a variety of organizational responses to migrant multilingualism in the health clinic, ranging from reliance on informal interpreting, with a family member or friend accompanying the patient, to the use of professional interpreters, including phone interpreting and multilingual leaflets. In another healthcare clinic study, Moyer (2013) investigates patient positioning and their capacity for agency in a range of interactions.

Education and training Historically, education and training is the most sustained area of focus for applied linguistic work on the language needs of migrants. We can distinguish within it 1 2

education and training provision for adult migrants, either on arrival or ongoing (see Cooke and Simpson 2008), and the language issues involved in the education of the children of migrants in mainstream and in complementary schooling (May 2014; Conteh and Meier 2014).

Issues in relation to item 1 include language learning and access to it through policy (Simpson and Whiteside 2015), particularly the impact of policy about citizenship and social integration on ESOL pedagogy (Cooke and Peutrell 2019); matters of adult language learning pedagogy (for example, Baynham 2006); the learning trajectories of ESOL learners (de Costa 2010); and the learning identities of bilingual learners (Norton 2013). Issues in relation to item 2 include the impact of policy and of linguistic barriers to access to curriculum achievement in the dominant language and opportunities to maintain and develop bi-/multilingual skills (Piller 2016) and the adoption of translanguaging approaches in pedagogy (García and Li 2014; Conteh 2018). Linking to our emphasis on institutional encounters, these would include sustained engagement with education and training, and also occasions both where access to these is gatekept by interviews and selection processes and where significant others, such as parents in relation to their children’s schooling, become involved (or not) in interactions with teachers and other school representatives. Interactions with school tend to be diffuse and textually mediated (Evans et al. 2016), more so than those in healthcare settings, for example. Important studies in the education of children from migrant communities look from home to school and back again. Gregory and Williams (2000) examine the home-school environments of Bangladeshi children in East London, UK, and Cruickshank (2006) the language situation of teenaged students of Lebanese background in Sydney. Such studies reflect a holistic perspective on research into language, migration, and settlement, emphasizing the interaction between different domains typically investigated separately. Attention is also paid to the role and functions of complementary schooling in supporting the bilingualism and cultural identity of children from migrant families (Huang 2018). At a policy level, the education and training of adult migrants is typically linked to a human capital agenda, with language training for work and economic benefit predominating. Established anxieties about integration and social cohesion, and the strengthening of the border and boundaries of the nation-state (Khan 2016), are also, as suggested earlier, a powerful influence. 25

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Transnationalism and virtual space The nature of migration as a transnational project of trajectories and flows has been increasingly highlighted by rapid change in virtual means for creating connectedness between people separated by distance, shrinking and compressing space-time, and enabling migrants to be in virtual contact with family and networks back home and elsewhere, regularly and instantaneously. Technological developments have enabled the accelerated creation and sharing of transnational virtual spaces in ways that go well beyond the boundaries of nation-states, with profound implications for language, identity, and belonging. Online communication is supported by the ubiquity of mobile technology and the use of social media to organize lives. Features such as integration, i.e. the co-existence of various communicative modes on a single platform (Androutsopoulos 2010), support the development of commonplace practices like transmedia meaning-making (Tagg et al. 2018), involving the combining of different media, and a great deal of movement between platforms. Early work on language use in transnational online communication contexts focused on the production of multilingual mixes and blends: Lam (2006) and Warschauer (2009) write about switches to Chinese and Arabic, respectively, incorporated using English orthography. More recently, attention is on mobile communicative resources and repertoires. Tagg and Lyons (2021), for example, observe a process of repertoire assemblage, how semiotic resources are co-constructed in the course of the unfolding mobile messaging interactions of Polish women in the UK. The growing extent of available semiotic resources affords greater range for people’s performance of identities and relationships, as noted by Androutsopoulos and Juffermans (2014). The creation of transnational multilingual identities has long been of compelling interest to researchers (Lam 2004; King and Bigelow 2019). With a focus on community, the studies in Leppänen et al. (2017) show how social media enables spaces in which, despite geographical distances, participants construct versions of selves, and align and disalign with others, in collectively monitored communal spaces online. Such changes in communicative practice entail a blurring of a sharp distinction between ‘being here’ and ‘being there’, with migrants able to maintain a virtual presence in their country of origin electronically, enabling translocal belonging (Roberts 2019).

Future directions Issues of language and migration are not set to disappear from the applied linguistics agenda. However, how we conceive of migration is bound to develop and change. We are unlikely to see a lessening of the desire of states for control of their borders in a period of uncertainty or of the use of language as a gatekeeping tool in migration policy. There are disturbing signs, too, of the stratification of labour markets mapping onto particular kinds of language competence. Such issues are powerfully expressed by Lorente (2017), in her study of transnational domestic work, another kind of policy-driven transnationalism driven by the push-pull of economic activity and necessity. Mobility of communication, however, does not depend on people’s physical movement, and we experience the increasing integration of digital information and communication into everyday life, the interweaving of the physical and the virtual. These changes work against the strengthening of national and ideological boundaries, a tension in evidence in struggles over restrictions over Google in China and various kinds of Internet connectedness in the Gulf states. Social media also have a proven capacity not just to inform but to deceive, with alt-right and other actors disseminating ‘fake news’ on topics such as 26

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migration. The communication landscape sketched in the media discourse section, with its tension between traditional news media and new online platforms, is bound to be a continuing influence on public discourses on migration. The unpredictability of migration is central to the lives of huge numbers of people globally, and much contemporary human mobility is anything but fluid. We may be working with an oversimplified and restricted notion of the migration process itself, which must be expanded to include other types of more short-term migration/mobility, such as seasonal working, serial migration, migration sans papiers, return migration, migration associated with the collapse of the nation-state (as documented by Vigouroux [2013] in relation to the Congo), and the consequent needs of refugees and asylum seekers. There is a tendency for such changes and disruptions to problematize language in some way, and if applied linguists are alert to these problematizations, applied linguistic insights and expertise can be drawn into the search for viable solutions. Finally, there is also a tendency to emphasize through sociological pessimism the negative aspects of migration and related linguistic issues. While recognizing the powerful exploitative forces at work in the economically driven push-pull of international, transnational, and internal migration, as well as the huge disparities in the neoliberal-shaped conditions of globalization, where access to mobility is marked by sharp inequalities, we have also to learn to see it in a more upbeat and positive light. It offers opportunities for agency, change, and enterprise, the linguistic imagination and hybridity produced potentially contributing to new forms of language and social activity, which could not have been envisaged if everyone had stayed at home.

Related topics institutional discourse; language policy and planning; translation and interpreting; multilingualism; language and translanguaging; linguistic landscape

Further reading Canagarajah, S. (ed.) (2017) The Routledge Handbook of Migration and Language, London: Routledge. (Wide-ranging survey of key themes relating to language and human mobility) Collins, J., Slembrouck, S. and Baynham, M. (eds.) (2009) Globalization and Language in Contact, London: Continuum. (Papers from the first AILA Language and Migration Network seminars) Maryns, K. (2006) The Asylum Speaker: Language in the Belgian Asylum Context, Manchester: St Jerome. (Linguistic ethnographic analysis of the asylum process in Belgium)

References Androutsopoulos, J. (2010) ‘The study of language and space in media discourse’, in P. Auer and J. E. Schmidt (eds.), Language and Space: An International Handbook of Linguistic Variation. Volume I: Theory and Methods, Berlin, New York: De Gruyter, pp. 740–757. Androutsopoulos, J. and Juffermans, K. (2014) ‘Digital language practices in superdiversity: Introduction’, Discourse, Context & Media, 4–5: 1–6. Angelelli, C. V. (2004) Medical Interpreting and Cross-cultural Communication, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Angelelli, C. V. (2020) ‘Language mediation and patient-centered communication’, in E. Postigo Piñazo (ed.), Interpreting in a Changing World: New Scenarios, Technologies, Training Challenges and Vulnerable Groups, Berlin: Peter Lang, pp. 13–36. Baker, P., Gabrielatos, C., KhosraviNik, M., Krzyzanowski, M., McEnery, T. and Wodak, R. (2008) ‘A useful methodological synergy? Combining critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics to 27

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examine discourses of refugees and asylum seekers in the UK press’, Discourse and Society, 19(3): 273–306. Baynham, M. (2006) ‘Agency and contingency in the language learning of refugees and asylum seekers’, Linguistics and Education, 17(1): 24–39. Baynham, M. and De Fina, A. (2016) ‘Narrative analysis in migrant and transnational contexts’, in M. Martin Jones and D. Martin (eds.), Researching Multilingualism, London: Routledge, pp. 31–45. Blackledge, A. and Creese, A. (2019) Voices of a City Market: An Ethnography, Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Blommaert, J. (2013) Ethnography, Superdiversity and Linguistic Landscapes: Chronicles of Complexity, Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Castells, M. (2000) End of Millennium, Malden, MA: Blackwell. Collins, J. and Slembrouck, S. (2006) ‘“You don’t know what they translate”: Language contacts, institutional procedure and literacy practice in neighbourhood health clinics in urban Flanders’, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 16: 249–268. Collins, J. and Slembrouck, S. (2007) ‘Reading shop windows in globalised neighbourhoods: Multilingual literacy practices and indexicality’, Journal of Literacy Research, 39(3): 335–359. Collins, J., Slembrouck, S. and Baynham, M. (eds.) (2009) Globalization and Language in Contact, London: Continuum. Conteh, J. (2018) ‘Translanguaging as pedagogy: A critical review’, in A. Creese and A Blackledge (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Language and Superdiversity, London: Routledge, pp. 473–487. Conteh, J. and Meier, G. (eds.) (2014) The Multilingual Turn in Languages Education: Opportunities and Challenges, Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Cooke, M. and Peutrell, R. (eds.) (2019) Brokering Britain, Educating Citizens: Exploring ESOL and Citizenship, Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Cooke, M. and Simpson, J. (2008) ESOL: A Critical Guide, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Creese, A. and Blackledge, A. (eds.) (2018) The Routledge Handbook of Language and Superdiversity, London: Routledge. Cruickshank, K. (2006) Teenagers, Literacy and School: Researching in Multilingual Contexts, London: Routledge. De Certeau, M. (1988) The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley: University of California Press. De Costa, P. (2010) ‘From refugee to transformer: A Bourdieusian take on a Hmong learner’s trajectory’, TESOL Quarterly, 44(3): 517–541. Dong, J. (2011) Discourse, Identity and China’s Internal Migration: The Long March to the City, Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Dong, J. and Blommaert, J. (2009) ‘Space, scale and accents: Constructing migrant identity in Beijing’, in J. Collins, S. Slembrouck and M. Baynham (eds.), pp. 42–61. Duchêne, A., Moyer, M. and Roberts, C. (eds.) (2013) Language, Migration and Social Inequalities, Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Evans, M., Schneider, C., Arnot, M., Fisher, L., Forbes, K., Hu, M., et al. (2016) Language Development and School Achievement: Opportunities and Challenges in the Education of EAL Students, Cambridge: The Bell Foundation. Fast, K. and Jansson, A. (2019) Transmedia Work: Privilege and Precariousness in Digital Modernity, London: Routledge. Galasińska, A.  and  Kozłowska,  O.  (2009)  ‘“Either”  and  “both”:  The  changing  concept  of  living  space  among Polish post-communist migrants to the United Kingdom’, in J. Collins, S. Slembrouck and M. Baynham (eds.), pp. 170–188. García, O. and Li, W. (2014) Translanguaging: Language, Bilingualism, and Education, London: Palgrave. Glick-Schiller, N. (2010) ‘A global perspective on transnational migration: Theorising migration without methodological nationalism’, in R. Baubock and T. Faist (eds.), Diaspora and Transnationalism, Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, pp. 109–130. Gregory, E. and Williams, A. (2000) City Literacies, London: Routledge. Harding, L., Brunfaut, T. and Unger, J. W. (2020) ‘Language testing in the “hostile environment”: The discursive construction of “secure English language testing” in the UK’, Applied Linguistics, 41(5): 662–687. Harvey, D. (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, Oxford: Blackwell.

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Heller, M. (2003) ‘Globalization, the new economy, and the commodification of language’, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 7(4): 473–492. Huang, J. (2018) ‘Translanguaging in a Birmingham Chinese complementary school: Ideology and identity’, in G. Mazzaferro (ed.), Translanguaging as Everyday Practice, Berlin: Springer, pp. 69–86. Inghilleri, M. (ed.) (2005) ‘Bourdieu and the sociology of translating and interpreting’, Special issue, The Translator, 11(2). Irvine, J. T. and Gal, S. (2000) ‘Language ideology and linguistic differentiation’, in P. V. Kroskrity (ed.), Regimes of Language, Santa Fe, New Mexico: School of American Research, pp. 35–84. Juffermans, K. and Tavares, B. (2019) ‘South-North trajectories and language repertoires’, in C. Kerfoot and K. Hyltenstam (eds.), Entangled Discourses: South-North Orders of Visibility, London: Routledge, pp. 99–115. Keating, C. (2009) ‘Changing participation in changing practice: Uses of language and literacy among Portuguese migrant women in the United Kingdom’, in J. Collins, S. Slembrouck and M. Baynham (eds.), pp. 233–251. Khan, K. (2016) ‘Citizenship, securitization and suspicion in UK ESOL policy’, in K. Arnaut, M. S. Karrebæk, M. Spotti and J. Blommaert (eds.), Engaging Superdiversity: Recombining Spaces, Times and Language Practices, Bristol: Multilingual Matters, pp. 303–320. King, K. and Bigelow, M. (2019) ‘The hyper-local development of translanguaging pedagogies’, in E. Moore, J. Bradley and J. Simpson (eds.), Translanguaging as Transformation: The Collaborative Construction of New Linguistic Realities, Bristol: Multilingual Matters, pp. 199–215. Lam, W. S. E. (2004) ‘Second language socialization in a bilingual chatroom: Global and local considerations’, Language Learning and Technology, 8(3): 44–65. Lam, W. S. E. (2006) ‘Re-envisioning language, literacy and the immigrant subject: New mediascapes’, Pedagogies: An International Journal, 1(3): 171–195. Leppänen, S., Westinen, E. and Kytölä, S. (eds.) (2017) Social Media Discourse, (Dis)Identifications and Diversities, London: Routledge. Liebscher, G. and Dailey-O’Cain, J. (2005) ‘West Germans moving east: Place, political space, and positioning in conversational narratives’, in M. Baynham and A. De Fina (eds.), Dislocations/Relocations: Narratives of Displacement, Manchester: St Jerome, pp. 61–85. Lorente, B. (2012) ‘The making of “workers of the World”: Language and the labor brokerage state’, in A. Duchêne and M. Heller (eds.), Language in Late Capitalism: Pride and Profit, London: Routledge, pp. 183–206. Lorente, B. (2017) Scripts of Servitude: Language, Labor Migration and Transnational Domestic Work, Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Loring, A. and Ramanathan, V. (eds.) (2016) Language, Immigration and Naturalization: Legal and Linguistic Issues, Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Martin-Jones, M. (2000) ‘Enterprising women: Multilingual literacies in the constructing of new identities’, in M. Martin-Jones and K. Jones (eds.), Multilingual Literacies, Amsterdam: Benjamins, pp. 149–170. Maryns, K. (2006) The Asylum Speaker: Language in the Belgian Asylum Context, Manchester: St Jerome. May, S. (ed.) (2014) The Multilingual Turn: Implications for SLA, TESOL and Bilingual Education, London: Routledge. McNamara, T. and Ryan, K. (2011) ‘Fairness versus justice in language testing: The place of English literacy in the Australian citizenship test’, Language Assessment Quarterly, 8(2): 161–178. Meinhof, U. (2009) ‘Transnational flows, networks and “transcultural capital”: Reflections on researching migrant networks through linguistic ethnography’, in J. Collins, S. Slembrouck and M. Baynham (eds.), pp. 148–169. Mezzadra, S. and Neilson, B. (2013) Border as Method, or the Multiplication of Labor, Durham: Duke University Press. Moyer, M. (2013) ‘Migrant agency, positioning and resistance in a healthcare clinic’, in A. Duchêne, M. Moyer and C. Roberts (eds.), pp. 196–224. Norton, B. (2013) Identity and Language Learning: Extending the Conversation, Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Piller, I. (2001) ‘Naturalization language testing and its basis in ideologies of national identity and citizenship’, International Journal of Bilingualism, 5(3): 259–278. Piller, I. (2016) Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Pratt, M.-L. (1987) ‘Linguistic utopias’, in N. Fabb, D. Attridge, A. Durant and C. MacCabe (eds.), The Linguistics of Writing: Arguments between Linguistics and Literature, Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 48–67. Rheindorf, M. and Wodak, R. (eds.) (2020) Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Migration Control: Language Policy, Identity and Belonging, Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Roberts, C. (2021) Linguistic Penalties and the Job Interview, London: Equinox. Roberts, R. (2019) Ongoing Mobility Trajectories, Singapore: Springer. Sabaté Dalmau, M. (2014) Migrant Communication Enterprises: Regimentation and Resistance, Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Schieffelin, B., Woolard, K. and Kroskrity, P. (eds.) (1998) Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shohamy, E. and Gorter, D. (eds.) (2009) Linguistic Landscapes: Expanding the Scenery, London: Routledge. Simpson, J. (2020) ‘Navigating immigration law in a “hostile environment”: Implications for adult migrant language education’, TESOL Quarterly, 54(2): 488–511. Simpson, J. and Whiteside, A. (eds.) (2015) Adult Language Education and Migration: Challenging Agendas in Policy and Practice, London: Routledge. Tagg, C., Hu, R., Hanusova, J. and Jankowicz-Pytel, D. (2018) ‘Polymedia and convergence: A study of social action and individual choice from the law phase of the TLANG project’, Working Papers in Translation and Translanguaging, WP36. https://tlang.org.uk/working-papers/ Tagg, C. and Lyons, A. (2021) ‘Repertoires on the move: Exploiting technological affordances and contexts in mobile messaging interactions’, International Journal of Multilingualism, 18(2): 244–266. Van Dijk, T. (1991) Racism and the Press, London: Routledge. Van Hout, T. and Burger, P. (2017) ‘Mediatization and the language of journalism’, in O. García, N. Flores and M. Spotti (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Language and Society, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 489–504. Van Leeuwen, T. and Wodak, R. (1999) ‘Legitimizing immigration control: A discourse-historical analysis’, Discourse Studies, 1(1): 83–118. Vertovec, S. (2007) ‘Super-diversity and its implications’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 30(6): 1024–1054. Vigouroux, C. (2009) ‘A relational understanding of language practice: Interacting timespaces in a single ethnographic site’, in J. Collins, S. Slembrouck and M. Baynham (eds.), pp. 62–84. Vigouroux, C. (2013) ‘Informal economy and language practice in the context of migrations’, in A. Duchêne, M. Moyer and C. Roberts (eds.), pp. 296–328. Warschauer, M. (2009) ‘Digital literacy studies’, in M. Baynham and M. Prinsloo (eds.), The Future of Literacy Studies, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 123–140. Wodak, R. and Reisigl, M. (1999) ‘Discourse and racism: European perspectives’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 28: 175–199.

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3 Language policy and planning Lionel Wee

Introduction Understood broadly as interventions into language practices, language policy and planning (LPP) has had a long and chequered history. As an academic discipline, however, LPP is relatively recent in origin, having gained momentum from the drives toward nationalism and nation building (Romaine 2021). This overview focuses on developments within LPP as an academic discipline, whose modern history can be described in three main stages (Ricento 2000): (1) an initial stage of optimism in the 1960s and 1970s that the language problems of newly independent states could be solved via the implementation of rational and systematic procedures, (2) a period of disillusionment in wake of LPP failures (1980s and 1990s) that opened the way for a more critical and reflexive appreciation of the role that language and linguists play in society, and (3) in the present period, a growing sense that LPP needs to be reconstituted as a multidisciplinary and politicized approach since the issues it grapples with are complex and represent interests that can pervade multiple levels of social life, ranging from the individual to the state and across state boundaries as well. It is worth viewing this history of LPP as a dynamic interplay between academic concerns, on the one hand, and political/bureaucratic interests, on the other. Such a perspective provides us with a better awareness of the kinds of constraints faced by applied linguistics as it attempts to engage with real-world language-related problems. So though it is the next section that specifically delves into the history of LPP, there is good reason, even as we move on to the later sections, to also keep in mind the challenges that arise when attempting to marry more intellectual understandings of language with the practical demands faced by both policy-makers and the peoples whose lived experiences are affected by sociopolitical decisions about language.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003082637-5

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LPP: a brief history Developing nation-states, developing LPP The emergence of LPP as a coherent field was closely tied to the fact that newly independent states in the post-colonial era (mainly Asian and African) were seen as in need of appropriate modernization and development programs. For these states, the concerns were multiple. There was often a desire to reclaim some essentialized national identity and a language that could be emblematic of this identity, as both were felt to have been lost (or least compromised) under colonial rule. The national identity and language, however mythical, usually had to be (re)constructed in the context of an ethnolinguistically diverse populace. Such a situation carried the potential for inter-ethnic tensions as competing ethnic loyalties had to be measured against any proposed candidate for national language status. But since a significant legacy of the colonial rule was an educated elite class with affiliations towards the colonial language, there was also the need to stem any potential conflict arising from class divisions. Consequently, while it was essential that these states worked to forge some sense of national cohesion, it was equally imperative that they aimed to raise the general level of education and welfare amongst the citizenry. The well-intentioned desire to contribute towards programs that could help cultivate national solidarity whilst also improving on standards of education and creating opportunities for economic growth led linguists to position themselves as expert consultants with the state as client. Thus, LPP practitioners saw themselves as devising maximally rational and efficient ‘solutions’ to the language ‘problems’ faced by these states (Haugen 1966; Kloss 1969; Rubin and Jernudd 1971). LPP was described by Das Gupta and Ferguson (1977: 4–6) as those planned activities which attend to the valuation of language resources, the assignment of preferences to one or more languages and their functional ordering, and developing the language resources and their use in a manner consistent with the declared objectives identified as planned targets . . . successful language planning, or degrees of it, can be understood in terms of the efficacy of planned policy measures as well as the target populations’ propensity to comply with the public policies pertaining to language planning. This desire to design programs that could contribute to public policy objectives encouraged the construction of technical concepts and distinctions that aimed to provide linguists with the theoretical vocabulary to systematically approach and diagnose LPP-related issues. Examples include the following: 1 2

3

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The idea of a rational model (Jernudd 1973), where alternative ways of tackling a problem were carefully compared before settling on the optimal choice. This approach assumed that LPP issues could be approached in terms of a cost-benefit analysis. The distinction between status planning and corpus planning (Kloss 1969): the former was concerned with official decisions about the appropriate use of a language. The latter was concerned with developing the ‘nuts and bolts’ of language itself (its vocabulary, forms of pronunciation, and syntax) so that a language could indeed serve its designated function. The distinction between processes of language selection, codification of the selected language as standard or correct, elaboration of the language form where necessary, and implementation to ensure that the standards were properly adopted (Haugen 1966). These

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processes were typically understood to apply sequentially so that LPP would be pursued in a manner that was organized and systematic. Understandably, the preferred method for data gathering during this period was the sociolinguistic survey. LPP practitioners were mostly working at the level of the state, and the scale of the envisaged changes made the choice of survey a practical one, as far as the tracking of language attitude and use amongst a large population were concerned. Information gathered via the survey was also more amenable to quantification, and relative rates of success could then be presented in a manner that was digestible to policy-makers. There is no disputing the fact that these concepts and distinctions, even today, continue to serve as valuable tools when thinking about LPP. This is because, at bottom, LPP involves making decisions about the desirability (or not) of promoting some language practices over others. Such decisions require some appreciation of the possible relationships between forms of language and their uses, and the ways in which these relationships might be influenced. What was problematic in this period was the absence of a critical orientation that might have otherwise prevented a number of assumptions from going unquestioned, such as the notion that each nation-state would be ideally served by having just one national language; the concomitant implication that multilingualism is problematic; and the belief that a developmental model designed for one societal context could be applied to another despite significant differences in sociocultural and historical specificities. These assumptions often guided the enthusiastic articulation of solutions designed along technocratic lines, when it would perhaps have been more helpful to ask if the framing of what counts as an LPP problem was itself in need of interrogation. I say ‘perhaps’ because, to be fair to these early attempts at LPP, it is not clear what kind of impact such a critical orientation – had one been present – would have had on decision-makers involved in the management of state objectives. There was always the possibility that in challenging or deconstructing a state’s framing of problems, linguists could simply have found themselves deemed largely irrelevant to the needs of these newly independent states.

Looking within By the 1980s and part of the 1990s, it became difficult to deny that many of the state-level LPP projects were failures: either the desired outcomes were not achieved, or worse, social and ethnic unrest continued to rise in many states despite the careful implementation of programmes. LPP practitioners were then more reticent about acting as advisors to the state. As Blommaert (1996: 203) observed, The grand projects in third world nations more or less disappeared during the 1980s, either because of manifest failure, or because of a lack of interest, resources, or political importance . . . The enthusiasm for language planning as an academic subject faded in the wake of the collapse of state systems and economies in the third world. This withdrawal of LPP practitioners from the role of expert consultant was accompanied by an internal criticism of the field itself. In an incisive paper, Luke et al. (1990: 27) suggested that LPP had been overly concerned with maintaining a ‘veneer of scientific objectivity’ and had ‘tended to avoid directly addressing larger social and political matters within which language change, use and development, and indeed language planning itself are embedded’. By 33

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viewing LPP as an essentially technocratic process of efficiently administering resources so as to achieve specific goals, little consideration had been given to questions of how such processes might help sustain dominance and dependency relations between groups. Indeed, by not adequately attending to the socially and politically contested nature of language, LPP initiatives, rather than solving problems, may in fact have simply exacerbated old problems or even created new ones. In a similar vein, Tollefson (1991) introduced a distinction to characterize what he saw as two major approaches to LPP: the neoclassical and the historical-structural. The major differences between the two are summarized by Wiley (1996: 115): 1 2 3

4

The unit of analysis employed: While the neoclassical approach focuses on individual choices, the historical-structural pays attention to relationships between groups. The role of the historical perspective: The neoclassical is more interested in the current language situation; the historical-structural, in contrast, emphasizes the role of sociohistorical factors. Criteria for evaluating plans and policies: The neoclassical is primarily amoral in its outlook; policies are evaluated in terms of how efficiently they achieve their goals. The historical-structural is more sensitive to issue of domination, exploitation, and oppression. The role of the social scientist: Consistent with its amoral outlook, the neoclassical assumes that the social scientist must and can approach language problems in an apolitical manner. On the other hand, the historical-structural views political stances as inescapable so that ‘those who avoid political questions inadvertently support the status quo’.

The neoclassical approach tends to emphasize the rational and individualistic nature of choices. For example, individuals may choose to learn a new language because of certain perceived benefits such as access to better jobs. Or they may decide that the time and money spent on learning a new language may not be worth the potential benefits and, hence, may not make the effort to expand their linguistic repertoire. Whatever the outcome, the neoclassical approach treats these as decisions that are freely and rationally made. But Tollefson emphasized that we need to also ask questions like ‘Why must that individual expend those particular costs? Why are those particular benefits rather than others available to that individual? What are the costs and benefits for other people in the community?’ (Tollefson 1991: 32). These kinds of questions require attending to the sociohistorical contexts and constraints inherited by individuals and mutatis mutandis, communities. LPP in the 1960s and 1970s had tended to work within the neoclassical approach. Language-related issues were treated as problems that could be rationally and logically solved by adopting the appropriate language policy. The individuals, families, or communities that were the targets of LPP were, by the same token, assumed to be likely to respond in a neoclassical fashion. Consequently, a major problem was that it had neglected to take into consideration the effects of sociohistorical factors in constraining the nature of choices. Tollefson’s concern was that more sensitivity towards the historical-structural approach was needed. This latter pays greater attention to the kinds of interests that particular policies may serve. LPP that is informed by the historical-structural approach would then aim to ‘examine the historical basis of policies and to make explicit the mechanisms by which policy decisions serve or undermine particular political and economic interests’ (Wiley 1996: 32). This understanding of LPP would have the advantage of helping practitioners be more cognisant of the possibility that planning bodies involved in policy-making may reflect the interests of 34

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dominant political groups, and this may work against any desire to achieve a broader and more equitable distribution of social and economic resources. As a result of these critical reflections, energies were directed more towards analyzing language-related decisions in a variety of spheres. In addition to government-initiated decisions (Pennycook 1994), there was stronger interest in schools (Corson 1989; Heller 1999), the workplace (Gee et al. 1996), and the ways in which public debates about language are initiated, resisted, or resolved (Blommaert 1999; Cameron 1995; Milroy and Milroy 1999). The challenges involved in trying to better understand the complex and often conflicted nature of language in social life contributed to the re-invigoration of LPP.

Renewing LPP In the present period, LPP has seen renewed interest and activity. Part of the excitement stems from the appreciation that linguists need not be apologetic about representing group-specific interests; they simply need to be clear about the nature of their involvement. Another reason for the excitement comes from the realization that LPP is even more complex than has been realized so far and that, if it is to be relevant as a field of applied linguistics, it will need to draw upon the insights of multiple disciplines. Once it became understood that LPP is always going to be inextricably intertwined with the advancing of specific interests, linguists were able to engage in various LPP-related activities with a clearer appreciation of their roles and responsibilities. ‘Scientific objectivity’ no longer means being blind to class interests or political factionalism. Rather, it means being aware that by acting as expert consultant to a group, community, institution, or state, a linguist has to be clear and comfortable with the goals of the client. Scientific objectivity, in this case, arises from the linguist utilizing their expert knowledge to better advise the client. This does not mean passively accepting a client’s goals since a consultancy also opens up the opportunity for both the linguist and client to learn from each other. This exchange may lead to an evaluation of the goals and well as a richer understanding of the social nature of language. For example, in their own experience with medical health professionals, Roberts and Sarangi (1999: 474) suggest adopting a stance of ‘joint problematization’, where the emphasis is one of ‘participatory and action-oriented research’. The advantage of this, they (1999: 498) point out, is that [i]n presenting findings in a non-conclusive way, social scientific researchers, including discourse analysts, can distance themselves from a problem-solver role by underscoring the fact that practical solutions are not in a one-to-one relationship with research-based knowledge. In other words, knowledge generated through research needs to be recontextualized in a reflexive way by the practitioners. A linguist may have a very personal commitment towards specific community goals. The linguist is then acting as not just expert consultant but also as advocate. One example is the master-apprentice program developed in California (Hinton et al. 2018), which aims to prevent, as far as possible, the Indigenous Native American languages from dying out. The program pairs master speakers (the tribal elders) with language learners in learning situations with relatively modest outcomes. Apprentices are not expected to develop the same level of fluency as the masters since many of the masters themselves may have not used their own languages for quite some time. Rather, it is hoped that after about three years, apprentices will be able to hold simple conversations. 35

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The complexity of LPP (Spolsky 2004: 39ff) comes from the awareness that it can operate at units of varying sizes, including the individual, the social group, the state and the diasporic community. LPP also involves ‘a wide range of linguistic and non-linguistic elements’, such as age, ethnicity, education, gender, and religion, among others. Furthermore, LPP is not limited to just named varieties of language (English, Spanish, Malay) but can involve smaller bits of language (pronunciation, punctuation, word choice) as well as bigger bits (forms of discourse). To make this complexity more tractable, LPP needs to distinguish between the language practices of a community, the language beliefs or ideology, and any efforts to modify or influence the practices (Spolsky 2004: 5). The first two components are always present since people will be using language for the conduct of activities, and people will also have various beliefs about language. The third component may not be present since there may not be any actual efforts to influence language practices. Under such circumstances, ‘ideology operates as “default” policy’ (Lo Bianco 2004: 750). This appreciation of the ideological basis of language practices has led to greater convergences with linguistic anthropology since the latter has contributed much to understanding how language ideologies are formed. The anthropological notion of ideology is not to be simply equated with false beliefs. Rather, ideologies refer to the specific social positions that individuals/communities/institutions all inevitably occupy and which mediate the understanding of sociolinguistic facts (Irvine and Gal 2000: 78–79). Sensitivity to the contestable nature of language decisions has also meant greater attention to variability and context. This in turn has led to a widening of the methods considered useful. Because language ideologies are highly variable and context-dependent, data gathered via the analysis of narratives, ethnographic approaches, and historically sensitive comparisons (Ricento 2009), all came to be considered relevant, in addition to surveys. This is not to deny the value of larger-scale statistical data, but such data are primarily ‘synoptic’ representations that abstract away from specific situational details (Bourdieu 1977: 107). They need to be complemented by richer understandings of the roles that actual language practices and the valuations accorded to them play in the lives of individuals and communities. Paralleling this interest in ideology, Lo Bianco (2004: 743, italics in original) has suggested that in addition to corpus and status planning, LPP also needs to recognize discourse planning, which refers to the influence and effect on people’s mental states, behaviors and belief systems through the linguistically mediated ideological workings of institutions, disciplines, and diverse social formations. Although discourse is quintessentially dialogical, and by definition permits contest and negotiation, planning discourse refers to the efforts of institutions and diverse interests to shape, direct and influence discursive practices and patterns. This suggestion that attention be paid to discourse planning is entirely congruent with the appreciation of the fact that there is no such thing as a purely objective or interest-free policy. All such initiatives represent a specific agenda, covertly or otherwise (Shohamy 2006). A discourse orientation can highlight the ways in which problems are framed and the interests served in such framings (Schön 1993). Finally, works drawing together the insights of scholars with backgrounds in economics, political philosophy, political science, social theory, and linguistics are slowly becoming more regularly produced (Brown and Ganguly 2003; Kymlicka and Patten 2004; Rappa and Wee 2006). This is an important development that should be further encouraged since it promises to benefit these contributing disciplines and enrich our understanding of LPP. For example, 36

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Montanari and Quay (2019) is collection that brings together diverse disciplinary perspectives on what it means to be multilingual. And Bastardas-Boada (2013) warns against the fragmentary perspectives on language policy that can result unless a conscious effort is made to adopt a more interdisciplinary approach. Such calls for engagements across different disciplines are important. While linguists can hope to learn more about the social and political complexities that inevitably accompany language in social life, other disciplines, too, can grow from taking greater note of the complications posed by language (see, for example, Patten and Kymlicka 2004: 1; De Schutter 2007: 1). The developments described here are critical because they put LPP in a position to better handle a number of important challenges, and it is to a discussion of these challenges that we now turn.

Challenges for LPP LPP is gaining in practical importance and urgency because of the way the world is developing. As a branch of applied linguistics, there is much that LPP can do to make a contribution to debates and discussions about the role of language in a fast-changing and increasingly culturally complex world. One significant challenge is to find ways of addressing multiculturalism. Much of the theorizing regarding multiculturalism and the politics of identity has come from philosophically inclined political or legal theorists (Benhabib 2002; Ford 2005; Kymlicka 1995; Taylor 1994) rather than linguists. While valuable, such theorizing is usually based on an ‘outdated empirical understanding of the concept of language itself’ and tends to be ‘unaware of important sociolinguistic and other research on these matters’ (De Schutter 2007: 3). Where LPP is concerned, the most prominent response has been to call for the adoption of language rights (May 2001; Phillipson and Skutnabb-Kangas 1995). The enormous appeal of the concept of language rights makes it all the more critical that the concept be subjected to careful scrutiny (Blommaert 2001; Stroud 2001). For example, while language rights may be useful as a short-term measure, it is not clear that they are tenable in the longer term. One reason for this is that there will be parties who have a vested interest in maintaining their (usually hard-won) language rights, and their motivations – such as the desire to cling to political power or to continue enjoying the benefits afforded by such rights – can be quite independent of how effective such rights may actually have been in addressing language issues. LPP needs to better understand the pros and cons of language rights and, where necessary, explore alternatives. This requires combining the insights of social and political theorists with a more sophisticated appreciation of the nature of language (Makoni and Pennycook 2007). The interest in multiculturalism and language rights gains further resonance because of complications posed by the commodification of language. As Budach et al. (2003: 604, full capitals in the original) point out, in a new world dominated by service and information economies, globalization engenders a seemingly paradoxical valuing of community and authenticity . . . In the new economy . . . the value of community and authenticity takes on a new shape in which COMMODIFICATION is central. At the same time, commodification provokes a potential uncoupling of language and community. Speakers and communities are likely to be increasingly caught up in the contradictions between treating language as a mark of cultural heritage and as a skill or resource to be used 37

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for socioeconomic advancement. For example, in Singapore, the policy of multiracialism aims to guarantee equal status amongst the three official ethnic mother tongues: Mandarin (for the Chinese community), Malay (for the Malay community), and Tamil (for the Indian community). However, the state has argued that, in addition to heritage reasons, Mandarin should also be learned in order to take advantage of China’s growing economy, thereby actively conceding that instrumental value is an important motivating factor in language choice. As a result, a growing number of non-Chinese parents want schools to allow their children to study Mandarin. This emphasis on Mandarin as a commodity has led to concerns within the Chinese community that the language is being learnt for the ‘wrong’ reasons: the language is being treated less as an emblem of local ethnicity and more as an economic resource for conducting business negotiations with China. More generally, these developments potentially undermine the multiracial logic of the policy since the equal status that all three mother tongues are supposed to enjoy is compromised by the fact that neither Malay nor Tamil can be claimed to enjoy the same economic cachet as Mandarin (Wee 2003). Thus, another important challenge for LPP is to take better account of the fact that traditional notions of ethnicity and nation do not fit easily with the multilingual dynamics of late modern societies, which are increasingly characterized by a pervasive culture of consumerism (Bauman 1998; Baudrillard 1988), where ‘people define themselves through the messages they transmit to others through the goods and practices that they possess and display’ (Warde 1994: 878). In this regard, Stroud and Wee (2007) have suggested that the concept of sociolinguistic consumption should be given a more foundational status in language policy, suggesting that this might offer a more comprehensive account of the dynamics of language choice and change. Finally, one of the most pressing challenges facing the world today is that of global migration and the related issue of ensuring the well-being and dignity of individuals as they move across the globe in search of a better life. As many states work to accommodate the presence of foreign workers, people seeking asylum, and other ‘aliens’ within their territories, the need to come up with realistic and sensitive language policies will require the input of LPP specialists. Absent such input, language policies may unfairly penalize the very people they were intended to help. Maryns (2005) provides one such example in her discussion of a young female from Sierra Leone seeking asylum in Belgium. Even though applicants are given the opportunity to declare what language they want to use for making their case, Maryns (2005: 300) notes that [a]ctual practice, however, reveals serious constraints on language choice, and these constraints are language-ideologically based: only monolingual standard varieties qualify for procedural interaction. This denial of linguistic variation leads to a denial of pidgins and creoles as ‘languages in their own right’. The ideology of monolingualism effectively denies pidgins and creoles any legitimate presence in the asylum-seeking procedure despite the fact that for many people seeking asylum, such mixed languages might constitute their most natural communicative codes. The move to a foreign country is not simply a shift in physical location; it is also a shift into a location where linguistic codes are differently valued. And the person seeking asylum is expected to accommodate the foreign bureaucratic context despite the communicative problems this raises (Maryns 2005: 312). In the particular case that Maryns observed, the female applicant’s (2005: 313) ‘intrinsically mixed linguistic repertoire’ (West African Krio) was displaced by the bureaucracy’s requirement that interviews and reports utilize only monolingual standards. The interview was conducted in English and a subsequent report written in Dutch, neither of which 38

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were languages that the applicant was comfortable with. As a result, details of the applicant’s narrative were omitted or misunderstood, and the applicant had no opportunity to correct any inaccuracies. The state representatives officiating over asylum-granting procedures often conduct interviews with people seeking asylum in contexts where the linguistic codes being used are not likely to be shared by those whose communicative needs are greatest. Notice that the problem here goes much deeper than making available different languages, such as Dutch, English, Xhosa, or Bantu. It involves a general reluctance to treat certain codes as being proper languages in the first place because of their mixed heritage. On this basis, mixed codes become stigmatized and are automatically ruled out of official consideration despite the fact that these codes are precisely what might be needed in order for people seeking asylum to gain a fair hearing. Even if granted permission to stay, challenges remain. For example, most Western countries assume that migrants will assimilate into their new societies by learning the dominant language (and its associated culture). This assumption is increasingly being challenged by the fact that ‘the size of minority residential communities’ makes it possible ‘that many of their members will be able to live out their lives using only, or predominantly, the minority language’ and also by the ‘tendency of migrants to maintain closer and more regular connections with their countries of origin’ (Ferguson 2006: 7).

The future of LPP The previous section highlights an urgent need for LPP to rethink the ontology of language and seriously evaluate the material implications. For too long, LPP has worked with the conception of language as a stable and identifiably bounded entity corresponding to established language names, despite being aware that this overlooks ‘the problematic history of the construction of such languages’ (Makoni and Pennycook 2007: 11). Consider a brief example (from Makoni and Pennycook 2007: 9). Sir George Abraham Grierson’s linguistic Survey of India, which was completed in 1928, had to face the problem of deciding on the boundaries between languages and dialects. To do this, Grierson openly admitted the need to invent language names while ignoring the complexities of actual language use (see Makoni and Pennycook 2007: 10). The invention of language names performatively called the languages into being. This does not mean that LPP should dismiss language names as mere fiction. As metalinguistic labels, names very possibly orient the language practices and social evaluations of speakers towards each other and, conversely, towards those whom they might consider nonmembers of the group. But LPP needs to start being more attentive to the problematic ways in which specific language practices get categorized under particular labels (including that of ‘non-language’) and the attendant impact of such categorizations on the social trajectories of individuals and communities. Similar considerations apply to concepts, such as agency, community, identity, and practice, which have for too long tended to be treated as ‘stable and bounded’ rather than ‘shifting and dynamic’ (Heller 2008). Consider the issue of agency (Wee 2021). Agency is typically understood in human-centric terms so that it is humans who are creative, and it is humans to whom competence in language use can be meaningfully attributed. In LPP, Spolsky (2009) has called for attention to be given to language management, asserting ‘that it is management only when we can identify the manager’ (2009: 6). The idea of a manager here seems to presume an identifiable locus of human agency. 39

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Ahearn (2001: 8) summarizes the complicated questions about agency that arise: Can agency only be the property of an individual? What types of supra-individual agency might exist? . . . Similarly, we might also be able to talk about agency at the sub-individual level . . . thereby shedding light on things like internal dialogues and fragmented subjectivities? Such complications arise because even a body, such as a government, a ministry, or a community, is really an abstraction over multiple sub-entities (themselves potentially recursively sub-dividable) so that ‘internal dialogues and fragmented subjectivities’ apply no less to organizations and groups than they do to individuals (Wee 2018). But there is another problem in addition to the distributed nature of agency: the tendency to downplay if not dismiss the roles of non-human entities (Bennett 2010: 34). Artificial intelligence is becoming more embedded in language and communication, often not merely aiding in the transmission of messages but contributing to message construction and completion. Examples range from simple WhatsApp messaging to Google Assistant and Apple’s Siri. Another example involves the concept of an echoborg. An echoborg is a person whose utterances and gestures are determined to varying degrees by the communications that originate from an artificial intelligence program. The interactional goal is to give the illusion that one is communicating with a fellow human being when in fact the communication originates from an artificial intelligence. The human with whom one is apparently communicating is really working at the behest of the artificial intelligence. Echoborgs can be useful since some individuals might feel more comfortable if they think they are interacting with another human even though the kinds of information and advice they want is better and more efficiently provided by an artificial intelligence. This ‘synching’ of a human front with messages that are created by an artificial intelligence raises conceptual issues such as the nature of speakerhood (Goffman 1981). Who exactly is speaking under such a condition where the activity of speaking is distributed over more than one entity? Is it the human extension or is it the artificial intelligence, or is such a binary approach misguided? LPP cannot afford to set aside these complex issues. The ideologies surrounding agency and language use bear on questions such as who might ultimately be held responsible for a piece of communication and how policies regulating messages transmitted via traditional and social media could be formulated and reasonably enforced (Gourlay 2021). Especially as machines become ‘intelligent’ agents, there is a need to anticipate the impact of technology on the constitution of speech communities and how the language practices of such communities might be managed (Kelly-Holmes 2021). Agency, community, identity, and practice: these concepts figure, in one way or another, in LPP studies, and unless they are reconceptualized (Pennycook 2017), LPP will continue to be encumbered by ‘some of their built-in limitations in current confrontations with the way things are unfolding in the world around us, confounding our attempts to understand them’ (Heller 2008: 505).

Concluding remarks It is appropriate to end this chapter by returning to the theme of how LPP practitioners should engage policy-makers and the general public. The critical revaluation of concepts such as language, community, and identity is part and parcel of the intellectual maturity of the field. But translating the insights gained by this maturity into relevant practical implications is a 40

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difficult enterprise. This is because there is an inevitable lag between the scholarly critique of concepts and the ways in which these are apprehended by the broader community. And if policy-makers and members of the public are still operating with less nuanced understandings of such concepts, these could make them less receptive to LPP initiatives that are grounded in more critical orientations. This is not to say that linguists should be considered final arbiters of appropriate LPP initiatives (recall the reference to Roberts and Sarangi’s notion of ‘joint problematization’). But it does mean that linguists need to be more strategic about how they position themselves as participants in language ideological debates. Specifically, they need to ask how they can resist the pressure to oversimplify their own expert knowledge of language whilst still remaining relevant to the ‘real’ world.

Related topics multilingualism; bilingual education; institutional discourse; language testing; language learning and language education; ethnicity; linguistic imperialism; world Englishes; language and migration

Further reading Cameron, D. (2000) Good to Talk?, London: Sage. (Cameron’s work presents a highly readable and insightful account of LPP – although this is not a term that is used in the book – in the call centre industry and its connections to the broader global economy.) Davis, K. and Phyak, P. (2018) Engaged Language Policy and Practices, London: Routledge. (Focusing on the global impact of neoliberalism, this book suggests strategies by which various actors [parents, educators, community leaders] can address language-related inequities, especially in relation to education.) Soler, J. (2019) Language Policy and the Internationalization of Universities: A Focus on Estonian Higher Education, Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter. (Giving particular attention to higher education in Estonia, this book examines how, as universities internationalize, English becomes both a site of struggle and opportunity for individuals and communities.) Spolsky, B. (2021) Rethinking Language Policy, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. (This book is an update of Spolsky’s earlier works on language policy and language management.)

References Ahearn, L. (2001) ‘Language and agency’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 30: 109–137. Bastardas-Boada, A. (2013) ‘Language policy and planning as an interdisciplinary field’, Current Issues in Language Planning, 14(3): 363–381. Baudrillard, J. (1988) Selected Writings, Cambridge: Polity Press. Bauman, Z. (1998) Work, Consumerism and the New Poor, Buckingham: Open University Press. Benhabib, S. (2002) The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in a Global Era, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bennett, J. (2010) Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham: Duke University Press. Blommaert, J. (1996) ‘Language planning as a discourse on language and society: The linguistic ideology of a scholarly tradition’, Language Policy and Language Planning, 20: 199–222. Blommaert, J. (ed.) (1999) Language Ideological Debates, Berlin: Mouton de Grutyer. Blommaert, J. (2001) ‘The Asmara Declaration as a sociolinguistic problem: Reflections on scholarship and linguistic rights’, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 5(1): 131–142. Bourdieu, P. (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brown, M. and Ganguly, S. (eds.) (2003) Fighting Words: Language Policy and Ethnic Relations in Asia, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Budach, G., Roy, S. and Heller, M. (2003) ‘Community and commodity in French Ontario’, Language in Society, 32: 603–627. 41

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Cameron, D. (1995) Verbal Hygiene, London: Routledge. Corson, D. (1989) Language Policy across the Curriculum, Philadelphia, PA: Multilingual Matters. Das Gupta, J. and Ferguson, C. A. (1977) ‘Problems of language planning’, in J. Rubin, B. H. Jernudd, J. Das Gupta, J. A. Fishman and C. A. Ferguson (eds.), Language Planning Processes, The Hague: Mouton, pp. 3–7. De Schutter, H. (2007) ‘Language policy and political philosophy’, Language Problems and Language Planning, 31(1): 1–23. Ferguson, G. (2006) Language Planning and Education, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Ford, R. T. (2005) Racial Culture: A Critique, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Gee, J. P., Hull, G. and Lankshear, C. (1996) The New Work Order: Behind the Language of the New Capitalism, NSW, Australia: Allen and Unwin. Goffman, E. (1981) Forms of Talk, Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press. Gourlay, L. (2021) Posthumanism and the Digital University, London: Bloomsbury. Haugen, E. (1966) Language Conflict and Language Planning: The Case of Modern Norwegian, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Heller, M. (1999) Linguistic Minorities and Modernity, London: Longman. Heller, M. (2008) ‘Language and the Nation-state: Challenges to sociolinguistic theory and practice’, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 12(4): 504–524. Hinton, L., Florey, M., Gessner, S. and Manatowa-Bailey, J. (2018) ‘The master-apprentice language learning program’, in L. Hinton, L. Huss and G. Roche (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Language Revitalization, London: Routledge, pp. 123–136. Irvine, J. T. and Gal, S. (2000) ‘Language ideology and linguistic differentiation’, in P. V. Kroskrity (ed.), Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities, and Identities, Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, pp. 35–83. Jernudd, B. H. (1973) ‘Language planning as a type of language treatment’, in J. Rubin and R. Shuy (eds.), Language planning: Current issues and research, Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, pp. 11–23. Kelly-Holmes, H. (2021) Language Policy 4.0: Are We Ready? Are We Relevant?, 16 April. www.youtube.com/watch?v=gD2HebcI0AA (accessed 11 February 2021). Kloss, H. (1969) Research Possibilities in Group Bilingualism, Quebec: International Center for Research on Bilingualism. Kymlicka, W. (1995) Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kymlicka, W. and Patten, A. (2004) Language Rights and Political Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lo Bianco, J. (2004) ‘Language planning as applied linguistics’, in A. Davies and C. Elder (eds.), Handbook of Applied Linguistics, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 738–762. Luke, A., McHoul, A. and Mey, J. L. (1990) ‘On the limits of language planning: Class, state, and power’, in R. B. Baldauf, Jr. and A. Luke (eds.), Language Planning and Education in Australasia and the South Pacific, Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, pp. 25–44. Makoni, S. and Pennycook, A. (2007) ‘Disinventing and reconstituting languages’, in S. Makoni and A. Pennycook (eds.), Disinventing and Reconstituting Languages, Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, pp. 1–41. Maryns, K. (2005) ‘Monolingual language ideologies and code choice in the Belgian asylum procedure’, Language & Communication, 25: 299–314. May, S. (2001) Language and Minority Rights: Ethnicity, Nationalism, and the Politics of Language, London: Longman. Milroy, J. and Milroy, L. (1999) Authority in Language, 3rd ed., London: Routledge. Montanari, S. and Quay, S. (eds.) (2019) Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Multilingualism, Berlin: Mouton. Patten, A. and Kymlicka, W. (2004) ‘Introduction’, in W. Kymlicka and A. Patten (eds.), Language Rights and Political Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 1–51. Pennycook, A. (1994) The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language, Harlow, UK: Longman. Pennycook, A. (2017) Posthumanist Applied Linguistics, London: Routledge. Phillipson, R. and Skutnabb-Kangas, T. (1995) ‘Linguistic rights and wrongs’, Applied Linguistics, 16(4): 483–504. 42

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Rappa, A. L. and Wee, L. (2006) Language Policy and Modernity in Southeast Asia, New York: Springer. Ricento, T. (2000) ‘Historical and theoretical perspectives in language policy and planning’, in T. Ricento (ed.), Ideology, Politics and Language Policies: Focus on English, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 9–25. Ricento, T. (2009) An Introduction to Language Policy: Theory and Method, Oxford: John Wiley & Sons. Roberts, C. and Sarangi, S. (1999) ‘Hybridity in gatekeeping discourse: Issues of practical relevance for the researcher’, in S. Sarangi and C. Roberts (eds.), Talk, Work and Institutional Order: Discourse in Medical, Mediation and Management Settings, Berlin: Mouton, pp. 473–503. Romaine, S. (2021) ‘Language policy and planning’, Oxford Bibliographies. www.oxfordbibliographies. com/view/document/obo-9780199772810/obo-9780199772810-0273.xml (accessed 11 February 2021). Rubin, J. and Jernudd, B. H. (eds.) (1971) Can Language Be Planned? Sociolinguistic Theory and Practice for Developing Nations, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Schön, D. A. (1993) ‘Generative metaphor: A perspective on problem-setting in social policy’, in A. Ortony (ed.), Metaphor and Thought, 2nd ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 137–163. Shohamy, E. (2006) Language Policy: Hidden Agendas and New Approaches, London: Routledge. Spolsky, B. (2004) Language Policy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Spolsky, B. (2009) Language Management, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stroud, C. (2001) ‘African mother-tongue programs and the politics of language: Linguistic citizenship versus linguistic human rights’, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 22(4): 339–355. Stroud, C. and Wee, L. (2007) ‘Consuming identities: Language planning and policy in Singaporean late modernity’, Language Policy, 6: 253–279. Taylor, C. (1994) ‘The politics of recognition’, in A. Gutmann (ed.), Multiculturalism: Examining the politics of recognition, Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 25–73. Tollefson, J. W. (1991) Planning Language, Planning Inequality: Language Policy in the Community, New York: Longman. Warde, A. (1994) ‘Consumption, identity-formation and uncertainty’, Sociology, 28(4): 877–898. Wee, L. (2003) ‘Linguistic instrumentalism in Singapore’, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 24(3): 211–224. Wee, L. (2018) ‘Language policy and management in World Englishes’, in E. L. Low and A. Pakir (eds.), World Englishes: Rethinking Paradigms, London: Routledge, pp. 183–199. Wee, L. (2021) ‘Rethinking agency in language and society’, International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 267–268: 271–275. Wiley, T. G. (1996) ‘Language planning and policy’, in S. McKay and N. Hornberger (eds.), Sociolinguistics and Language Teaching, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 103–147.

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4 Family language policy Kendall A. King

Introduction Family language policy is an expanding, interdisciplinary area of research which, broadly conceived, examines what family members believe about language(s) and language learning, how family members interact with each other, and what family members attempt to do with language, at times through explicit planning, management, or decision-making. Research under this banner has expanded and coalesced in the last 15 years or so, and there is now an ample body of empirical studies on myriad facets of family language policy in a wide range of contexts. Concomitantly, researchers have engaged in robust conversations concerning how family, language, and policy should be construed, who has been overlooked or excluded from studies to date, and what the most appropriate objectives and methodological approaches are. In this chapter, I provide a brief historical overview of the development of this area of work. I then take up some of the critical and currently unfolding issues, including limitations, recent critiques, and new directions. Next, I highlight some key developing strands of work and methodological advances. And lastly, I consider the scope and boundaries of this area of the research, and the potential practical applications to pressing social issues, including language revitalization efforts and the broader struggle for raciolinguistic equity.

Historical perspectives Early definitions of family language policy were rooted in and initially framed as extensions of the field of language planning and policy. While the latter has tended to focus on language policy development and implementation in official contexts such a government, schools, or other public-facing institutions, family language policy researchers, in turn, sought to closely examine language policy, language ideology, and language practice within the home and family domains (King et al. 2008). Early definitions framed family language policy as ‘explicit and overt planning in relation to language use within the home among family members’ (King et al. 2008). This focus on the family was driven in part by theory and research in the area of language revitalization (or reversing language shift), which was tirelessly championed by Joshua 44

DOI: 10.4324/9781003082637-6

Family language policy

Fishman. This work stressed the critical role of the family in determining child language competencies and by extension, ensuring intergenerational transmission and language survival. Indeed, a central point across much of Fishman’s later work (1991, 2001), and the key takeaway from his Graded Intergenerational Dislocation Scale, or GIDS, was the centrality of the home and family in ensuring intergenerational transmission. For Fishman, all other language reversal efforts, including, for instance, minority language newspapers, Saturday language classes, and radio programming, were at best biding time if they did not directly lead to restoration of intergenerational transmission. The work of Fishman and colleagues generated scrutiny of the family domain as well as critiques of the GIDS (e.g. Romaine 2006). One problematic aspect of Fishman’s GIDS model was the binary unidirectional manner in which intergenerational transmission was conceptualized – that is, as something the parent or grandparent generation achieved once and for all (or not). Luykx (2005), in early insightful research with multilingual Andean families, argued that close analysis of family language policy, and in particular, the variable influence of children in shaping adult language practices, was central to understanding societal shifts towards Spanish and away from Indigenous languages, such as Quechua and Aymara. Others pointed not only to the bidirectionality of language socialization but to questions of which variety was being transmitted, how language competencies and preferences shifted over time, and what multilingual, multimodal practices were families engaging in. Given both the importance and complexity of intergenerational transmission, King et al. (2008) suggested the productive potential of bridging the work of child language psychologists, on the one hand, and language policy scholars, on the other. While child language scholars had long been interested in how children acquire first, second, and multiple languages, they often focused on the individual child rather than the family unit. Language policy – in particular Spolsky’s tri-part framework (2004) for language policy, which focuses on language ideologies (what people believed about language), language policies (what people tried to do with language), and language use (what people actually did with language) – could productively be applied to the family unit. Spolsky (2012) likewise argued for the need for more studies to examine what he termed the internal pressures (e.g. ideologies or grandparents) and external pressures (in particular, the school) on what he termed ‘the critical family domain’.

Critical issues and topics Over the last decade or two, as researchers of multilingualism and family language learning have increasingly grappled with patterns of intensified migration and technological saturation, the methodological tools and even the questions asked within family language policy have evolved. Earlier studies of bilingual and multilingual development in the family often focused on language learning outcomes for the child – that is, what parent ideologies and language practices led to what child language proficiencies (De Houwer 1999, 2007; Lanza 1997; see overview in King and Fogle 2013). In turn, more recent work has tended to examine meaning-making and the language-mediated experiences of multilingual families and thus posed a different set of questions. For instance, how do families make sense of multilingualism across generations and how is language woven into family dynamics (Zhu Hua and Li Wei 2016)? How does meaning emerge and evolve through repeated and varied performance in everyday talk in multilingual homes (He 2016)? How do families make decisions about language (and come to understand those decisions) in changing contexts (Curdt-Christiansen 2016)? How do families’ multimodal communication practices support the construction of a family unit (Kozminska and Zhu Hua 2021)? Moreover, 45

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the contexts of family communication have become the target of investigation rather than something that is assumed, as meaning is seen as both produced and interpreted within particular places, activities, social relations, interactional histories, and cultural ideologies (King and Lanza 2019). As highlighted in the next paragraph, this shift in focus has implications for research methodology. Concomitantly, the study of family language policy has been appropriately critiqued for not keeping up with the changing, variable, and divergent nature and definitions of family and for being biased towards documenting two-parent, heteronormative, middle-class homes in which children are acquiring more than one European language (Wright 2020). More recent work has given greater emphasis to how these language socialization and interactional processes play out within so-called non-traditional (e.g. adoptive, gay, single-parent) families in nonWestern, transnational, or diasporic contexts (e.g. Canagarajah 2008; Wright and Palviainen 2021). More broadly, as scholars have recognized that who we study largely shapes what we know, the study of family language policy has increasingly focused on and intentionally recruited a wider, more diverse range of family types, languages, and social contexts (Higgins and Wright 2022). One thread of this work has documented the increasingly transnational nature of family life. Transnationalism broadly refers to the social processes by which migrants establish social fields that cross political, demographic, social, and cultural borders, maintaining relationships and connections that span nation-state borders. Transnational aspects of family lives have been highlighted in recent work. Gallo and Hornberger (2019), for instance, examined the experiences and language practices of families, who, due to US deportation policies, were tenuously spread across the US-Mexico border. Likewise, Said and Zhu Hua (2019) analyzed the language practices of one four-member family within the UK. The family’s transnational connections and investment in local transnational institutions resulted in the two boys (aged nine and six) speaking a mixture of Yemeni, Algerian Arabic, Classical Arabic, and English. These sorts of transnational connections are facilitated by technology, and increasingly, the lives of many families can be characterized as digitally saturated. For instance, data from the UK suggests that children aged five to sixteen spend an average of six and a half hours a day in front of a screen compared with around three hours in 1995 (BBC 2015). Scholars of family language policy are only beginning to analyze the ways that screens and technological devices shape, limit, and/or promote varied interactional patterns among family members. For instance, while research long suggested that children do not learn language from passive exposure to language (e.g. viewing videos) (Kuhl et al. 2003), a growing body of work suggests that if exposure is socially contingent – that is, if there is back-and-forth, two-way interaction – language learning can and does take place (Roseberry et al. 2013). As interactive social media technology become ubiquitous in many homes, this raises important questions about the nature of family and language learning and transnationally connected families (e.g. Palviainen 2022). The supposed overt, explicit nature of family language policy has also been examined. In many parts of the world, in particular among the middle and upper-class families in OECD countries, approaches to parenting are increasing defined by what has been called ‘competitive’ or ‘concerted cultivation’ approaches. Indeed, family language policy has expanded as a field in step with ‘concerted cultivation’ parenting. This term, popularized by Annette Lareau (2003), refers to a parenting style characterized by parental attempts to foster their child’s talents by incorporating organized activities in their children’s lives and cultivating particular ways of adult-like talk, such as debate and negotiation. Lareau qualitatively documented the cultural logic of this high (or hyper) investment parenting among middle- and upper-middleclass parents in the US. 46

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Economists explain this intensive parenting as not just the driver but also the result of increasing economic inequality. Doepke and Ziliboti (2014) examined the relationships between economic inequality in Sweden, China, Spain, and the US and preferences for intensive parenting styles over time. Overall, countries with high levels of economic inequality favour pushier parenting; countries with lower levels of economic inequality favour more laissez-faire approaches emphasizing creativity and independence. Doepke and Ziliboti further find that in the 1960s and 1970s, when laissez-faire parenting reached the peak of its popularity, economic inequality was at an all-time low. This make sense: given the relatively low returns to education, there was little reason for parents to competitively cultivate their children. However, as they note, the most recent three decades, in contrast, have seen rising inequality together with increasing returns to education. Children who fail to complete their education are unlikely to attain a secure, middle-class life, and consequently, parents have redoubled their efforts to ensure their children’s educational success. They predict that if the trend towards greater inequality continues, the current era will mark the beginning of a sustained trend towards ever pushier parenting (2014). The rise of pushier competitive parenting or concerted cultivation approaches has deep implications for family language policy. Competitive parenting has given rise to an everincreasing number of books, blogs, advice columns, and how-to manuals aimed at soothing worried parents’ concerns over the ‘right’ or ‘best’ approaches to promote bilingualism and to give their children a competitive edge (e.g. King and Mackey 2007). These texts are largely shaped by neoliberal objectives that treat language as a commodity and skill to be developed for individual cognitive, academic, and professional gain rather than as a means for interpersonal connection. By many definitions, language policy requires some overt, explicit attention to language. This trend towards ‘concerted cultivation’ suggests that such attention to language is increasingly common in some sectors, but as Lareau (2003) and others indicate, not in all. Thus, this attention to language teaching and use in the home, or for instance, as is described in the next section, to at-home ‘language workouts’, has the potential to further drive existing differences in family language practices and, potentially, other types of inequalities, as (some) families engage in this competitive and private planning.

Current contributions and methodological advances While family language policy researchers have increasingly engaged with broader, more diverse and fluid definitions of family, how scholars study families and what they seek to learn have also shifted. Indeed, as researchers of multilingualism and family language learning begin to come to terms with both material and demographic changes, the methodological tools and even the questions asked have changed. As suggested earlier, researchers are increasingly interested in how families are constructed through multilingual language practices and how language functions as a resource for this process of family-making and meaning-making in contexts of transmigration, technology saturation, and hypermobility. Moreover, this close analysis of semiotic data is increasingly taken by researchers as essential to understanding its significance, given that meaning is ‘far more than just the “expression of ideas”, and biography, [rather] identifications, stance and nuance are extensively signalled in the linguistic and textual fine-grain’ (Blommaert and Rampton 2011: 10). This newer work highlights identity and agency and is more likely to draw from multiple, complementary methodological and empirical approaches. Recent examples include Smagulova’s (2019) use of survey and conversational analysis (CA) to uncover the ideologies of language in Kazak language revival. Smagulova’s analysis of 47

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code-switching in adult-child interactions uncovers how this reimagining of Kazakh is accomplished and identifies four mutually reinforcing metalanguaging practices. These include limiting Kazakh to pedagogic formats, constructing Kazakh as school talk, confining Kazakh to ‘prior text’ and the co-occurrence of shift to Kazakh with a shift to a meta-communicative frame. Smagulova’s findings expand our understanding of the discursive processes through which ideologies of language revival are both created and sustained. Another example: Purkarthofer (2017) critically examined the language expectations of three multilingual couples, each with a different language background and varied experiences of migration – and each of whom is expecting or has just had their first child. Purkarthofer adopted speaker-centred qualitative methods, including what she defines as language portrayals and biographic narratives, to analyze (real and imagined) constructed spaces of interaction. Close analysis of three co-constructed narratives based on the expectations of the future parents revealed the construction of the child as a multilingual self in her or his own right. Purkarthofer’s multimodal analysis of drawings and interviews demonstrates the collective and interactive construction of three-dimensional future family spaces and provided a window into the parents’ imagined language future of these children. Purkarthofer’s work highlights the importance of imagination, and the ways in which parents’ planning for multilingualism can remain open to new possibilities. Other researchers have introduced methods such as autoethnography to deepen our understanding of family language policy experiences and interactions. Autoethnography is a research approach that explicitly acknowledges and accommodates the messy, uncertain, and emotional nature of social life by showing people in their process of figuring out what to do, how to live, and the social cultural meanings of their struggles (Adams et al. 2015). This approach embraces the researchers’ subjectivity as they are the primary participant. Liu and Lin (2018) take up this method to explore their experiences in family language planning in English as a foreign language, a language which is non-native to both parent-authors. They develop and share personal narratives of their bilingual parenting experience and analyze their decisionmaking processes, concerns they encountered, their bilingual parenting practices, and their reflections on their ‘journey’. Other scholars have recently (re)examined and deepened how ‘success’ is defined within family language policy by unpacking the nexus of a parent’s prior experiences, expectations surrounding language use, and overt and covert language policies (Smith-Christmas et al. 2019). This work, which builds on long-term, large-scale ethnographies of family language policy in an immigrant context (Turkish in the Netherlands), an autochthonous minority language context (Gaelic in Scotland), and an officially bilingual state (Swedish in Finland), underscores how it is not simply each parent’s own sense of identity that determines the degree to which languages may be successfully maintained within the home and by whom it is done but rather the intersection of personal identities (historical body) with wider sociopolitical realities (interaction order and discourses in place) and the complex and multifaceted nature of these sociopolitical identities. (98) In a similar vein, Sonia Wilson (2020) focuses on the experiences of children and transnational families, asking how much parents should promote bilingualism and what are the costs of pushing too hard. By emphasizing the voices of young heritage speakers within intercultural English-and-French-speaking families, Wilson’s six case studies encourage us to prioritize 48

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the emotional experience of the child rather than idealized notions of ‘successful’ balanced bilingualism. These post-structural research approaches have highlighted, among other dynamics, the critically important role of the child. Revis (2019), as another example, emphasized child agency in family language policy among a less-typically-studied population. Drawing on ethnographic data from two refugee communities in New Zealand, Revis provided examples of the micro-processes of language transmission by focusing on children as powerful agents who alternatively collaborate with or subvert their parents’ language policy. She shows how their language choices were influenced by exposure to the educational field and alignment with their peer groups and sometimes explicitly tied to ethnic identity constructions. Revis demonstrates how the notion of habitus (Bourdieu 2007) mediated between structure and agency in everyday life in migrant families. As she explains, on the one hand, children were confined by structures that shaped their habitus: among others, they were affected by the dominant ideologies particularly in the educational field and the rules and practices enforced by their parents. Given the partly diverging cultural and linguistic norms and attitudes conveyed in these contexts, the children acquired a ‘cleft-habitus’, that is a simultaneous sense of belonging and alienation (Bourdieu 2007: 69). On the other hand, the children were agents of cultural and linguistic change. (Revis 2019: 187) Other recent research approaches, by looking closely at family interactions, have uncovered routines that suggest concerted cultivation approaches to parenting. Fernandes (2019), for instance, analyzes instructional routines, what she terms ‘language workouts’. Her examination of Swedish-Russian mother-child interactional patterns revealed use of teacher-talk register (e.g. corrections, known-answer questions, hyper-articulation) during these workouts. Her findings suggest that the realization of language policy in bilingual families relies not only on parental input but also on the position of the child as a speaker and learner vis-a-vis the parent, and highlights a format that allows for educational, affective, and engaging exploration of bilingual language use with young children at home. As Fernandes explains, ‘in mobilizing a teacher talk-register, it resembles classroom discourse and so-called home lessons. Yet, it is specific in its sequential organization and consistent employment of a parent talk-register, which dialectically invokes educational and intimate dimensions’ (97). Song (2019), in turn, examined a South Korean migrant family’s language socialization practices in a US city, presenting a sociolinguistic analysis of five-year-old child’s (Yongho) code-switching practices. Song focuses on how the social meanings of languages and language ideologies enacted in his home were brought into play through Yongho’s code-switching during a dispute with his mother. The analysis demonstrated how Yongho’s code-switching arranged and shifted different voice tones, speech acts, and stances, according to the situated context. Song’s work highlights how Yongho’s code-switching practice ‘establishes an alignment with social types of persons that the particular linguistic practice indexes, through which he shifted and negotiated his social relation to others – a submissive self in Korean and an authoritative figure in English’ (103). Other work has highlighted variable practices of bilingual siblings and adolescents. Kibler et al. (2016) examined the role of older siblings in shaping language and literacy practices in Spanish-speaking immigrant homes. They demonstrate how the older siblings serve as resources in many Latino homes. Johnsen (2021), in turn, examined the multilingual experiences of three Norwegian-and-Spanish-speaking adolescents with transnational backgrounds. 49

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This piece highlights how youth continuously adapt to changing sociolinguistic circumstances within the family. Indeed, she suggests that language competences, linguistic identities, language confidence, and linguistic repertoires are dynamic entities that develop across the lifespan. Analysis adolescents reveals how changes in their linguistic repertoires produced tensions or conflictive feelings, opportunities, and new, hybrid practices. Her findings draw attention to the complex ways in which young multilinguals represent and use their linguistic repertoires and add to research that underscores the importance of considering children’s and adolescents’ agencies and perspectives. Another expanding line of work focuses on within or cross group differences over time or context. For instance, Lee (2021) examined intragroup variations with Korean immigrant families residing in the US with differing transnational life trajectories. She compared three groups: first-generation families (long-term stayers), first-generation families (short-term stayers or recent immigrants), and 1.5-generation families (long-term settlers, with parents having arrived in middle school years). Her data demonstrate the intergenerational impact of intragroup diversity on language use, attitudes toward bilingualism, and future orientations. Overall, 1.5-generation Korean parents tended to report that maintenance of Korean is based on value and strength of connections to the Korean community, while short-term stayers saw Korean as useful only for eventual return to Korea. Long-term stayers, in turn, tended to believe that well-developed bilingual skills increased one’s economic and life opportunities. While all families strategically managed their language practices and policies, future orientations were crucial in shaping how resources were allocated towards the two languages. In a novel approach, Kusters et al. (2021), in turn, asked how intrafamily language policy is shaped by intensive interfamily communication, in this instance, among deaf-hearing families on multi-family holiday. They found that language use in the group shifted over the 12-day holiday in several ways. On the one hand, some signs and words became known by more members of the group, and thus, language use became more diverse instead of converging towards commonly known or used signs/words across the group. On the other hand, there was also a slight shift in the four families towards more English, a shift towards more British Sign Language/International Sign, and a shift towards more signing and sign-speaking. Kusters et al. (2021) note that as found in past work, family language policy is constantly negotiated and changeable between family members and that some language practices are legitimized over others within families. More broadly, their work points to the richness of multilingual multimodal strategies in novel contexts. Other recent work has examined ‘narratives of change’ among repatriated, returnee and immigrant Russian-speaking mother identities in Finland (Wright and Palviainen 2021). Through interviews and ethnographic field work, they demonstrate how mothers transform their life trajectories, parenting beliefs, and ethnolinguistic identities in relation to their own children and to other Finnish parents and in the context of migration. Kozminska and Zhu Hua (2021), in turn, closely examined multimodal recorded moments of everyday interaction to understand how one multilingual LGBTQ-identified family with adoptive children used particular language practices to make meaning and to construct their family unit. Kozminska and Zhu Hua demonstrate the ways in which individuals co-experience and co-create a loving family life, revealing how this sort of building of family life is done together multimodally and multilingually in English and Polish. See also Romanowski’s monograph (2021) on family language policies in the Polish diaspora; focusing on Australia, he uses online questionnaires and case studies of divergent family practices to reveal how policies are negotiated, contested, and formed by both children and caregivers. 50

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Taken together, these recent examples of research illustrate a commitment to close analysis of language use in naturalistic contexts and, in many cases, to the ways in which the broader political, cultural, and ideological context shapes family life and family language practices. As Purkathofer (2021) notes of her research with German speakers in Norway, but it is also true of much recent work, the focus is on uncovering the complex semiotic resources that families use to construct and maintain family language policies and practices, especially in light of the subjects’ positions relative to broader ideological and societal discourses. As shown earlier, this newer line of work is also characterized by inclusion of broader range of languages (e.g. signed and spoken), family types (gay, adoptive, single-parent), and contexts (including refugee-background and short-term migratory ones). While much of this work has focused on meaning-making and interactive processes, it is worth noting that some scholars have continued to take an outcomes-oriented approach. MacCormac and MacCormac (2021), for instance, ask ‘in what ways do parental decisions made throughout an immigrant child’s life course regarding language use and language learning shape their multilingual identity and attitudes towards the use of multiple languages in their everyday adult life?’ (36–37). Focusing on immigrant-background families residing in Canada, they report notable differences between families with established, explicit language policies, and those with no overt language policy. Children from families with no established language policy reported that this ‘lack of linguistic support or strategies provided by their parents to be detrimental to their transition into the new society’ (42); in turn, children with an established family language policy reported a smoother transition into Canadian life.

Recommendations for practice With few exceptions, recent family language policy work has stepped away from outcomesoriented research, opting instead to focus on interaction as a meaning-making process. Indeed, scholars such as Zhu Hua and Li Wei (2016) have argued for the value of examining mundane moments in family interactions with the goal of understanding the varied experiences of individuals and the strategies enacted to deal with multilingualism rather than on questions of intergenerational transmission or on overall patterns of language maintenance or shift. For their part, Hiratsuka and Pennycook (2019) offer an expansion and critique of notions of family, language, and policy, arguing that better insights can be gained from exploring what they call the ‘translingual family repertoire’. They suggest that rather than focusing on heritage language maintenance efforts or some sort of explicit family language policy, attention, at least in the one family they study, is on ‘getting by’ translingually – that is, on doing family life with the aid of a repertoire of diverse resources. For Hiratsuka and Pennycook (2019), ‘the family repertoire’, as both ‘an enabler and an outcome of family interactions’, should be the focus of study (749). From one vantage point, this shift in focus prompts questions concerning the objectives and boundaries of family language policy as an area of study. For instance, what does ‘family language policy’ as a banner ‘buy us’ and to what extent is it a productive or useful as a label for an area of study? Indeed, researchers from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds have productively studied child language learning and family-based interaction for many decades (see King and Fogle 2013, for a historical review). For instance, scholars of child language socialization have identified interactional patterns and cultural meanings behind those in a wide range of world contexts (Schieffelin and Ochs 1986). Researchers in the field of childhood studies have advanced our understanding of children as agentive beings (SmithChristmas 2021). Child language psychologists have used quantitative measures like surveys 51

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and assessments to determine links between reported parental language practices and child language proficiencies (De Houwer 2021). ‘Family language policy’ as a descriptive label perhaps has allowed for or even promoted a sense of coherence around a research topic and context, providing scholars with a hook to hang their hat, so to speak. Nevertheless, as evident here, the objectives, boundaries, methods, and scope of study are highly divergent and, indeed, far from clear or decided. Put succinctly, given the widely divergent disciplinary and methodological orientations taken up by researchers, ‘family language policy’ as a descriptor does not tell us overly much. From another vantage point, this move towards ethnographic portraits of meaning-making in families, while in step with work of colleagues in cultural anthropology and aligned fields, does little to answer the how questions often posed by families and by minoritized language communities in particular. Caretakers concerned with language, like many policy-makers, tend to be more interested in data-informed recommendations concerning what practices are most likely to lead to what outcomes. For members of endangered Indigenous language communities, these are pressing, immediate, and at times life-or-death issues for the languages in question. Caretakers, unlike many researchers in the field, tend to ask questions like the following: How much exposure to the target language is needed and when in the child’s life is this most critical? How proficient must the caretaker be in the target language to provide high quality or sufficient exposure? How can caretakers best support multiple language learning goals when a child has development disorders or special learning needs? How can caretakers help children develop expertise in target language when they are exposed to multiple varieties from different family members? What is the best practice when child refuses and rejects target language completely? Why are some speakers seemingly ‘stuck’ at the introductory level for so many years? (King and Hermes 2014). Most researchers of family language policy are committed to raciolinguistic equity; that is, we share the belief that speakers of all languages are entitled to equal respect, rights, and privileges, including the opportunity to pass on their language to their children. As McIvor (2020) argues, applied linguists hold specific knowledge and skills that could be extended to Indigenous language revitalization and other language minority communities to support these aims. To ensure progress towards the goal of raciolinguistic equity, family language policy researchers have the responsibility to ask and answer questions from a stakeholder perspective (in this case, a caretaker or parent) about language use and language learning in the home and the policies and practices most likely to ensure intergenerational transmission. To do this effectively, we need to be asking appropriate questions and, simultaneously, collaborating with racialized communities and caretakers. This includes taking interpersonal and structural racism into account as a factor which impacts intergenerational transmission. We have many of the tools to this work already at hand. For instance, we have a solid body of research pointing to the ways that identity and ideology matter and often serve as constraints to transmission. We know that racist ideologies of language diminish the perceived value of a language and that children are highly sensitive to these valuations. We know that children need significant amounts of sustained, interactive exposure to the language to develop productive competence in it. We further understand that language socialization is two-way, interactive, and highly fluid and that any study of family language policy must consider child agency. We also have evidence that the language policies caretakers establish, in many cases, have lasting consequences for the well-being of the child, impacting how they connect with family and community into adulthood. What is less clear – and what drives many parents’ questions – is the balance or interplay between these broader constraints and individual agencies. 52

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Future directions Equally unclear is how to balance competing and divergent research agendas and how to best predict which direction the next generation of scholars will take this area of study. Arguably, in light of the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath, research on family language use and learning is more important than ever before. Worldwide, people are spending much more time at home, with caretakers not just parenting but home-schooling, befriending, entertaining, and teaching their children. This is gendered work. In the US, for instance, 4.6 million women lost their jobs since pandemic; 32% report that these losses were due to lack of childcare. Women, long the primary caregivers with an outsized influence on language development, have been taking on this caretaking role disproportionately. Stress, fatigue, mental health issues, and economic challenges of extreme isolation, including the loss of ‘weak ties’, are increasingly well documented. Further, in the US and in many other contexts, this crisis is racialized with the most vulnerable communities disproportionately impacted. And concomitantly, recent years have been characterized by huge increases in screen time for both children and adults and uneven access to in-person, high-quality education. In this dramatically new landscape, new family language policy questions have arisen, including the following: To what extent will all this ‘at home’ time bolster or protect home languages? What will be the long-term impact of extended school closures be on acquisition of second, school, and societal languages? How do video technologies such as Zoom shape these questions, given the dramatic upticks in screen time for parents and children and the profound changes in who we interact with and how? What will be lasting impacts on educational equity and language proficiencies, given the frequently uneven access to education and social services? Indeed, questions of family language policy seem all the more crucial in light of the myriad social, economic, and psycho-emotional crises brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic and resultant extended quarantines. Worldwide, quarantines and lockdowns have tended to centralize the family unit but simultaneously put it under huge stress. These stressors will threaten if not wholly reverse the gains of recent decades in gender, economic, and racial equality. Arguably, the pandemic and the social, cultural, and economic shifts it entails have made family language learning and use and its related questions and fields more relevant and more central than ever.

Related topics language socialization; language policy and planning; minority/Indigenous language revitalization; language loss

Further reading De Houwer, A. (2021) Bilingual Development in Childhood, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (This comprehensive review and analysis by a leading developmental psychologist explains how different language learning settings dynamically impact bilingual children’s language learning trajectories. De Houwer explains how and why children eventually learn to speak the societal language, but they often do not learn to fluently speak their non-societal language, threatening children’s and families’ harmonious bilingualism.) McIvor, O. (2020) ‘Indigenous language revitalization and applied linguistics: Parallel histories, shared futures?’, Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 40: 78–96. (Written by a scholar deeply committed to Indigenous language revitalization, this paper considers commonalities, differences, and current and future interests for shared consideration, collaborations, and partnerships between applied linguistics and Indigenous language revitalization scholars.) 53

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Wright, L. (2020) Critical Perspectives on Language and Kinship in Multilingual Families, London: Bloomsbury Academic. (Focusing on historically marginalized families [single-parent, adoptive, and LGBTQ+], this book brings together cutting-edge theory and original empirical findings to advance the field.)

References Adams, T. E., Jones, S. H. and Ellis, C. (2015) Autoethnography: Understanding Qualitative Research, Oxford, NY: Oxford University Press. BBC (2015) ‘Children spend six hours or more a day on screens’, BBC Online News, 27 March. www. bbc.com/news/technology-32067158 (accessed 6 June 2019). Blommaert, J. and Rampton, B. (2011) ‘Language and superdiversity’, Diversities, 13: 1–22. Bourdieu, P. (2007) Sketch for a Self-Analysis, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Canagarajah, A. S. (2008) ‘Language shift and the family: Questions from the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora’, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 12(2): 143–176. Curdt-Christiansen, X.-L. (2016) ‘Conflicting language ideologies and contradictory language practices in Singaporean bilingual families’, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 37(7): 694–709. De Houwer, A. (1999) ‘Environmental factors in early bilingual development: The role of parental beliefs and attitudes’, in G. Extra and L. Verhoeven (eds.), Bilingualism and Migration, New York, NY: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 75–96. De Houwer, A. (2007) ‘Parental language input patterns and children’s bilingual use’, Applied Psycholinguistics, 27: 411–424. De Houwer, A. (2021) Bilingual Development in Childhood, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Doepke, M. and Zilibotti, F. (2014) ‘Tiger moms and helicopter parents: The economics of parenting style’, VOX CEPR Policy Portal. https://voxeu.org/article/economics-parenting Fernandes, O. A. (2019) ‘Language workout in bilingual mother-child interaction: A case study of heritage language practices in Russian-Swedish family talk’, Journal of Pragmatics, 140: 88–99. Fishman, J. (1991) Reversing Language Shift: Theoretical and Empirical Foundations of Assistance to Threatened Languages, Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Fishman, J. (2001) Can Threatened Languages Be Saved?: Reversing Language Shift, Revisited: A 21st Century Perspective, vol. 116, Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. Gallo, S. and Hornberger, N. H. (2019) ‘Immigration policy as family language policy: Mexican immigrant children and families in search of biliteracy’, International Journal of Bilingualism, 23(3): 757–770. He, A. W. (2016) ‘Discursive roles and responsibilities: A study of interactions in Chinese immigrant households’, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 37(7): 667–679. Higgins, C. and Wright, L. (eds.). (2022) Diversifying Family Language Policy, London: Bloomsbury. Hiratsuka, A. and Pennycook, A. (2019) ‘Translingual family repertoires: “No, morci is itaiitai panzita, amor”’, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 41(9): 749–763, 2020. Johnsen, R. V. (2021) ‘Then suddenly I spoke a lot of Spanish’: Changing linguistic practices and heritage language from adolescents’ points of view’, International Multilingual Research Journal, 15(2): 105–125. Kibler, A. K., Palacios, N., Simpson-Baird, A., Bergey, R. and Yoder, M. (2016) ‘Bilingual Latin@ children’s exposure to language and literacy practices through older siblings in immigrant families’, Linguistics and Education, 35: 63–77. King, K. A. and Fogle, L. (2013) ‘Family language policy and bilingual parenting’, Language Teaching, 46(2): 172–194. King, K. A., Fogle, L. and Logan-Terry, A. (2008) ‘Family language policy’, Language and Linguistics Compass, 2: 1–16. King, K. A. and Hermes, M. (2014) ‘Why is this so hard? Ideologies of endangerment, passive language learning approaches, and Ojibwe in the United States’, Journal of Language, Identity and Education, 13(4): 268–282. King, K. A. and Lanza, E. (2019) ‘Ideology, agency, and imagination in multilingual families’, International Journal of Bilingualism, 23(3): 717–723.

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King, K. A. and Mackey, A. (2007) The Bilingual Edge: How, When and Why to Teach Your Child a Second Language, New York, NY: HarperCollins. [Translated and published in German by Parthas Verlag in 2009; in Korean by Moonye in 2012; in Vietnamese by Quangvan Books in 2014; in Chinese by Beijing Language and Culture University Press in 2019]. Kozminska, K. and Zhu Hua (2021) ‘Making a family: Language ideologies and practices in a multilingual LGBTQ-identified family with adopted children’, Paper presented at AAAL (online conference). Kuhl, P. K., Tsao, F. and Liu, H. (2003) ‘Foreign-language experience in infancy: Effects of short-term exposure and social interaction on phonetic learning’, PNAS, 100: 9096–9101. Kusters, A., De Meulder, M. and Napier, J. (2021) ‘Family language policy on holiday: Four multilingual signing and speaking families travelling together’, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 42(8): 698–715. Lanza, E. (1997) Language Mixing in Infant Bilingualism, Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press. Lareau, A. (2003) Unequal Childhoods, Berkeley: University of California Press. Lee, H. (2021) ‘No more Korean at home: Family language policies, language practices, and challenges in Korean immigrant families: Intragroup diversities and intergenerational impacts’, Linguistics and Education, 63 (online). Liu, W. and Lin, X. (2018) ‘Family language policy in English as a foreign language: A case study from China to Canada’, Language Policy, 18: 191–207. Luykx, A. (2005) ‘Children as socializing agents: Family language policy in situations of language shift’, ISB4: Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Bilingualism (Vol. 1407), Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press. MacCormac, K. and MacCormac, M. (2021) ‘Navigating the cumulative effects of family language policy during childhood for immigrant youth in Canada’, Society Register, 5(2): 31–56. McIvor, O. (2020) ‘Indigenous language revitalization and applied linguistics: Parallel histories, shared futures?’, Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 40: 78–96. Palviainen, Å. (2022) ‘This is the normal for us: Managing the mobile, multilingual, digital family. In C. Higgins and L. Wright (eds.), Diversifying Family Language Policy, London: Bloomsbury. Purkarthofer, J. (2017) ‘Building expectations: Imagining family language policy and heteroglossic social spaces’, International Journal of Bilingualism, 23(3): 724–739. Purkarthofer, J. (2021) ‘Navigating partially shared linguistic repertoires: Attempts to understand centre and periphery in the scope of family language policy’, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 42(8): 732–746. Revis, M. (2019) ‘A Bourdieusian perspective on child agency in family language policy’, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 22(2): 177–191. Romaine, S. (2006) ‘Planning for the survival of linguistic diversity’, Language Policy, 5: 441–473. Romanowski, P. (2021) Family Language Policy in the Polish Diaspora: A Focus on Australia, New York: Routledge. Roseberry, S., Hirsh-Pasek, K. and Golinkoff, R. M. (2013) ‘Skype me! Socially contingent interactions help toddlers learn language’, Child Development, 85(3): 956–970. Said, F. and Zhu Hua (2019) ‘No, no maama! Say “Shaatir ya Ouledee Shaatir”! Children’s agency in language use and socialization’, International Journal of Bilingualism, 23(3): 771–785. Schieffelin, B. and Ochs, E. (1986) ‘Language socialization’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 15(1): 163–191. Smagulova, J. (2019) ‘Ideologies of language revival: Kazakh as school talk’, International Journal of Bilingualism, 23(3): 740–756. Smith-Christmas, C. (2021) ‘Using a family language policy lens to explore the dynamic and relational nature of child agency’, Children & Society, 00: 1–15. Smith-Christmas,  C.,  Bergroth,  M.  and  Bezcioğlu-Göktolga,  I.  (2019)  ‘A  kind  of  success  story:  Family  language policy in three different sociopolitical contexts’, International Multilingual Research Journal, 13(2): 88–101. Song, J. (2019) ‘Language socialization and code-switching: A case study of a Korean-English bilingual child in a Korean transnational family’, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 22(2): 91–106. Spolsky, B. (2004) Language Policy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Spolsky, B. (2012) ‘Family language policy: The critical domain’, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 33(1): 3–11.

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Wilson, S. (2020) Family Language Policy: Children’s Perspectives, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Wright, L. (2020) Critical Perspectives on Language and Kinship in Multilingual Families, London: Bloomsbury Academic. Wright, L. and Palviainen, A. (2021) ‘Narratives of change: Repatriated, returnee, and immigrant Russian-speaking mother identities in Finland’, Paper presented at AAAL (online conference). Zhu Hua and Li Wei (2016) ‘Transnational experience, aspiration and family language policy’, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 37(7): 655–666.

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5 Critical discourse analysis, critical discourse studies, and critical applied linguistics Karin Zotzmann and John P. O’Regan

Introduction Several overviews of the emergence and the different varieties of critical discourse analysis (CDA), critical discourse studies (CDS), and critical applied linguistics (CALx) already exist (Catalano and Waugh 2020; Wodak and Meyer 2015; Zotzmann and O’Regan 2016; Pennycook 2001, 2021). In this chapter, we focus on the relation between context – that is, the social issues researchers commonly address – and theoretical and conceptual developments. Our objectives with this procedure are threefold: We aim to highlight the distinctiveness of critical discourse approaches in applied linguistics and to provide a framework that may assist researchers in making informed theoretical, methodological and normative choices based on the exercise of judgemental rationality. Our overview also raises questions for critical analysts of discourse in the face of today’s most pressing social, political, and environmental issues, such as the undermining of democracy in the digital age, gross systemic inequality, attacks on the concepts of truth and scientific knowledge by populists, and the ensuing global environmental crisis. In the context of these shifts, we ask what kind of theoretical perspectives would be most suited to understanding these problems, the role of semiosis within this and the potential for making a difference. Here, we wish to align ourselves with Fairclough et al. (2004) by arguing that semiotic analysis in CDA might benefit from a closer engagement with theoretical perspectives derived from critical realism (CR) (Bhaskar 2008a [1975], 2008b [1993], 2016), particularly around ontological realism, epistemic relativism, judgemental rationalism and truth.

Historical perspectives Any form of CDA, CDS or CALx starts with a social problem before clarifying and analyzing the role that discourse/semiosis plays therein. Despite the diversity of perspectives – from neo-Marxism and Foucauldianism to a range of post-structuralist positions – most analyses are not only critical and normative but also interdisciplinary, involving areas such as sociology, philosophy, anthropology, political science, and psychology. Journals such as Discourse and Society (established 1990), Critical Discourse Studies (established in 2004), and Critical Multilingualism Studies (established in 2011) bear testimony to this. The name CDS indicates DOI: 10.4324/9781003082637-7

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a shift from an original CDA to a broader theoretical engagement with issues of reception, contexts, methods, counter-hegemonic discourses, and reframing (Catalano and Waugh 2020). CALx, for its part, takes up ‘issues of disadvantage . . . – structure and agency, ideology and discourse, colonialism and decoloniality, sexuality and discrimination [and explores] how these areas intersect with each other and how they relate to language and applied linguistic concerns’ (Pennycook 2021: 20). Despite the fact that all these approaches assume that discursive practices are closely interrelated and interact with other elements of the social and the material ‘extra-discursive’ world, the question of how this interrelationship can be conceptualized and translated into research is, however, highly contested and dependent upon the theoretical perspectives adopted. The first section of this chapter therefore begins with earlier perspectives in CDA, referencing key concepts such as discourse, ideology, critique, truth, and emancipation. CDA originally emerged out of the field of critical linguistics established by Fowler et al. (1979) and Hodge and Kress (1979) in the 1970s. These authors began to draw upon social theory to understand how contextual factors influence the internal constituents and makeup of spoken and written texts and how these discursive practices and representations in turn influence how we understand a specific part of the natural or social world. This is succinctly expressed in the diagram Fairclough initially developed in the 1989 edition of his book Language and Power (Figure 5.1). Fairclough represents discourse as operating at three dialectically interrelated levels: My view is that there is not an external relationship ‘between’ language and society, but an internal and dialectical relationship. Language is a part of society; linguistic phenomena are social phenomena of a special sort, and social phenomena are, in part, linguistic phenomena. (Fairclough 1989: 23) The three-dimensional conception of discourse corresponds to a three-dimensional method of analysis including description, interpretation, and explanation. In a first move, a text should be described comprehensively and systematically in terms of the semiotic resources that are used and the meanings which this use invokes but also in respect of what may be absent and perhaps even purposefully obscured. This allows the analyst to, secondly, conjecture about the potential impact this text might have on readers or listeners. To this end, there needs to be an explanation of why the text was produced in this form in a specific wider social and cultural context. The explanation is closely linked to critique as the aim is to show how the misrepresentation helps to sustain and legitimize observed social relations, which, in earlier iterations of CDA/CDS, were largely centred upon highlighting unjust social relations, often, from a neo-Marxist and/or critical theory perspective. Critical theory was indexed often in relation to Frankfurt School immanent critique (Adorno 1973) and also to notions of hegemony, ideology, and distorted communication in the works of Gramsci (1971), Althusser (1971), and Habermas (1971a, 1971b), respectively. The focus of early forms of CDA was thus squarely on exposing those discursive practices and representations of the world that obfuscate, stabilize, and legitimize power asymmetries, inequalities, and injustices and for many researchers this remains the aim today. This has entailed for many the possibility of rationally grounded truth and a commitment to human emancipation. The counterposing of the existence of an underlying truth with an ideological false consciousness or distortion of truth (Marx 1998 [1845]) began to be heavily criticized in the 1970s through post-modern philosophy, mainly through the work of the French social theorist Michel Foucault (1977, 1989) but also others, such as Jean-François Lyotard (1984), Jacques Derrida (1976) and Jean Baudrillard (1994 [1981]). These authors wanted to break with what 58

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Process of production

Text

Description (Text analysis)

Interpretation (Processing analysis) Process of interpretation Discourse practice Explanation (Social analysis)

Sociocultural practice (Situational; Institutional; Societal)

Dimensions of discourse

Dimensions of discourse analysis

Figure 5.1 Fairclough’s three-dimensional view of discourse

they saw as the Marxist dualism (ideology/truth) and regarded truth, but also other categories like ‘liberty, autonomy, democracy and emancipation’, as contentious and problematic since dogmatically followed they ‘can become instruments of repression, power and/or governance’ themselves (Herzog 2016: 280). Foucault understood these conceptions as closely related to power and our knowledge of reality as always relative and discursively meditated. Rather than primarily assuming power to be purposefully exercised by individuals or groups over others, he placed emphasis instead on its unseen dimensions and its social distribution. These regimes of truth, he argued, are often internalized, embodied, and enacted (1977) and thus operate unnoticed by individuals. From this perspective, power is unavoidable and does not only constrain and oppress but also enables social life. Based on the idea that we can apprehend reality only discursively, many post-modernist and post-structuralist analysts embrace epistemic relativism – that is, they regard the very idea of ‘truth’ and ‘objectivity’ as ideological. Instead, they emphasize the incommensurability of different discourses and focus on their local production and effects (Lyotard 1984). This emphasis on epistemic relativism entails a demand for reflexivity, and discourse analysts – but likewise ethnographers or anthropologists working in this tradition – often reflect upon their own positionality when they produce discursively mediated knowledge.

Research methods As problem-oriented critical domains, CDA, CDS, and CALx develop their own methods in relation to specific interests and objects of research (Chouliaraki and Fairclough 1999; Pennycook 2021). In addition to this, the approaches are highly diverse. They include the 59

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dialectical-relational approach of Fairclough (2010), the discourse-historical approach of Wodak, Reisigl, and others (Reisigl and Wodak 2001, 2015; Wodak et al. 1999), the sociocognitive approach of van Dijk (2008, 2015), and the CALx perspective of Pennycook (2021). Therefore, there is no uniform methodological ‘toolbox’ in this area of research. Nevertheless, we would like to give two brief examples which have been developed in relation to specific objects of analysis.

Policy analysis Policy analysis can take a variety of forms. Mulderrig (2017), for instance, has analyzed antiobesity campaigns in the UK. Starting from a particular social problem, the increase in obesity in the population, she focuses on the government’s attempt to ‘nudge’ children and adults into healthy eating behaviours and physical exercise through cartoon advertisements. To show how the campaign both represents and fosters internalized, embodied, and enacted forms of power, she draws upon Foucault’s work on governmentality and biopolitics and combines it with state theory. Mulderrig’s analysis shows how the anti-obesity campaign represents and targets mainly lower working-class families, individualizes healthcare, and is embedded in and driven by a neoliberal austerity regime. The three intersecting discursive and multimodal strategies she identifies are the representation of (northern, working-class) lifestyles as delinquent, a discourse of risk and threat that intends to mobilize emotions, and the promotion of ‘smarter’ consumerism.

Metaphor analysis Metaphors are figures of speech that generally represent an item X – for instance, an object, subject, action, quality, or process – as something else (Y). By combining or synthesizing X and Y, a new meaning emerges that shapes how we view X as certain aspects will be foregrounded whereas others become backgrounded or entirely erased. Apart from these cognitive effects, metaphors are also socioculturally embedded and often internalized and embodied. Their potential to shape cognition and behaviour thus often go unnoticed. Koller (2005) has investigated how the choice of metaphors in business discourse is driven by ideologies and how these metaphors, in turn, impact social cognition. To this end, she analyzed a corpus of 160,000+ business magazine texts on mergers and acquisitions (M&As) and found that the predominant metaphors revolved around ‘evolutionary struggle’. This Darwinist representation of capitalist business creates the view that M&As are part of a natural, ahistorical, and unalterable process involving masculine aggression and the survival of the fittest, and thus, they neatly play into the currently dominant neoliberal capitalist order of things.

Critical issues and topics In this section, we argue that our contemporary social, political, and environmental context is qualitatively different from that of the pre-neoliberal era of more than four decades ago. This has implications for CDA as this poses questions concerning fundamental theoretical assumptions about the relationship between semiosis and the social and material world and by implication about key concepts, such as discourse, ideology, critique, truth, and emancipation. 60

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Surveillance capitalism and post-truth politics Digital technologies are in principle neutral tools that can enable people to communicate, learn, associate, and do business in new ways. The relative lack or absence of political regulation, however, has led to a monopolization of this sphere by tech giants, such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple. These Big Five offer services that are by no means free as the actual flow and nature of the information is highly structured through algorithms which are programmed according to strategic interests (Archer 2020). Users’ engagement with digital tools is harvested, automatically analyzed, and used to fine-tune business strategies and influence consumer or voting behaviour. Few authors would disagree with the diagnosis of the adverse effects of the current configuration of the digital environment, but what is often overlooked is that the sophisticated manipulation of thought and behaviour through algorithms also diminishes agency. As Zuboff (2019) describes it, the digital texts we engage in at the level of discourse are determined by an underlying ‘text’ that is designed, owned, and used by others. Its structure is hidden from view and thus not transparent to users. Due to the affordances of the digital environment, we live in a qualitatively different environment with profound effects on politics: In the first instance, the public sphere has been fragmented through social media that are used by an increasing percentage of citizens to keep themselves politically informed. Social media ‘are, however a truth-less public sphere by design’ (Marres 2018: 423) as false and misleading information can be easily produced and distributed instantaneously. The resulting echo chambers and filter bubbles have centrifugal powers on social cohesion because they obstruct engagement with views one would disagree with. This in turn threatens one of the fundamental principles of democracy: informed debate and rational argumentation between parties in disagreement (Habermas 1971a, 1971b). The resulting polarization of society has diminished the sense of a shared reality and concomitantly of what we can agree on to be ‘true’. This in turn is of strategic interest to populist ‘post-shame’ politicians (Wodak 2019, 2020) who do not necessarily make ‘alternative’ claims to truth but promote the idea that fundamental truth is an obsolete category and that in the public sphere claims to truth are in equivalence and are not to be checked against an external reality. The consequences of these structural, technology-driven, strategic interventions have already changed the geopolitical order, shifting entire democracies onto a more autocratic footing, generating hatred and xenophobia, and derailing urgently necessary actions to ameliorate climate change. As Pomerantsev (2019) argues, we live in a world where influence campaigns are insidious and hidden from view. In comparison to the Cold War era where ideologies clashed, ideologies today are an afterthought as ‘information itself is now where the action is’ (p. 21). Of course, discourse is key to ‘post-truth’ politics as populists like Donald Trump in the US, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and Boris Johnson in the UK have successfully capitalized on the gross injustices and discontent neoliberal policies have generated over the past four decades and which their political parties and the economic interest groups they represent have directly championed (Hochschild 2016). The maintenance and obfuscation of these contradictions requires intense discursive work, for instance, through the reduction of economic, political, and social complexities to easy ‘knee-jerk’ formulae and the deliberate provoking of social dissension by means of xenophobic nationalism and ‘culture wars’. In such contexts, the generation and seemingly assured presentation of lies as ‘alternative facts’ and the bullying and demonization of those espousing democratic rationalist views are all symptoms of a more intensive and visibly desperate determination to safeguard the accumulation of capital. 61

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Critical discourse analysts can and should play an important role in understanding how these representations are constructed, what effects these discourses have on voting behaviour, and how these debates might be reframed. An exclusive focus on semiosis would, however, be short-sighted without dealing with ‘the generative complexes at work’ (Bhaskar 2008a [1975]: 48) which are responsible for the (re)production and maintenance of these phenomena, including, as outlined earlier, the strategic use of computer technologies and processes of capital accumulation. To capture this interplay, we argue that a stratified ontology is necessary (Sayer 1999), one which accounts for the different properties and powers of discourse/semiosis, technology/artificial intelligence, political economy/capital and human social relations.

Post-truth, ideological endism, and climate change Post-truth politics overtly disregards truth and those institutions, such as academia and the law, whose purpose it is to generate truthful knowledge (Block 2020). Post-truth politicians and their media agents portray experts – commonly those who disagree with the capitalist-extremist and xenophobic-nationalist line of reasoning they pursue – as ‘elites’ who unduly exercise ‘inauthentic’ power over ‘the people’ and who are purveyors of ‘fake news’. In these circumstances, we seem to have arrived at a situation where ‘subjective opinions and unverified claims [may legitimately] rival valid scientific and biomedical facts in their public influence’ (Harris Ali and Kurasava 2020). This has been accompanied – especially since the financial crisis of 2007–2008 – by a retreat into endism. This is ‘the view that history, once real, has come to an end in the present’ (Bhaskar 2016: 183). No new ideologies of qualitative institutional or social change appear; only market fundamentalism remains along with the endless drive to accumulate (Bhaskar 2002; Hartwig 2011; O’Regan 2021). This in turn has been responsible for preventing governments from rationally assessing the systemic failures of capitalism and taking the steps which are essential if pressing problems such as climate change and global human inequality are to be addressed. Climate change, as Malm (2017: 11) argues, is the prime example of the need for a historical perspective: There is no synchronicity in climate change. Now more than ever, we inhabit the diachronic, the discordant, the inchoate: the fossil fuels hundreds of millions of years old, the mass combustion developed over the past two centuries, the extreme weather this has already generated, the journey towards a future that will be infinitely more extreme – unless something is done now – the tail of present emissions stretching into the distance . . . History has sprung alive through a nature that has done likewise. The depletion of non-renewable resources and pollution generated by industrial growth and non-action leads to irreversible climate change and has already had devastating effects on human society and the economy. The unprecedented public dismissal and degradation of scientific advice and the role of experts thus occur at a time when science is most needed. Climate change is commonly denied based on the claim that it has not been proven or that there is no consensus among scientists (Oreskes and Conway 2010). Apart from the fact that doubt in science is deliberately engineered by think tanks paid by the fossil fuel and other industries and disseminated by media outlets affiliated with those interest groups, the claim that there is a lack of consensus or empirical evidence represents a misunderstanding of how science should ideally work. Agreement among all members of the scientific community – or of any community for that matter – is not a criterion for the truthfulness of a claim. The validity of the claim 62

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rests in the relation to the world it refers to. As such, scientists extrapolate and abstract from empirical evidence to generate the best explanation or theory of the phenomenon, which can then form the basis for concerted action. Climate change is, however, also a perfect example of how semiosis can have effects on the non-discursive as representations and denial of climate change influence people’s perceptions and judgements, as well as their responses to anthropogenic climate change. Climate change denial distributed through social and other media works back through reflexive agents and institutions on other strata of the social and natural world. The withdrawal of the US under Trump from the Paris Climate Accords and the push to further excavate fossil fuels had real damaging effects on the natural world. Critical analysis of discourse research can help to deconstruct and reframe such debates but only if the fundamental nature of the problem and the role of discourse/semiosis therein is understood – namely, ‘how social relations combine with natural ones that are not of their making’ (Malm 2017: 72). To understand these interrelationships, it is of utmost importance to hold the powers of nature and society analytically distinct as Malm and other critical realists have argued. For two things to interact, they must first be held analytically apart so that we can ‘study their differencein-unity – we need to know how they interact, what sort of damage the one does to the other and, most importantly, how the destruction can be brought to an end’ (p. 61). In addition to this, a clear conceptualization of epistemic relativism (i.e. that rationally grounded truths can exist even though our knowledge of the world is always changing) in relation to a normative commitment to judgemental rationality (i.e. the ability to decide on rational grounds whether some explanations and accounts, and also particular outcomes, are better than others) is much needed. However, in the more post-structuralist social constructivist quarters of critical discourse analysis, the notion of truth is often highly contested as we earlier outlined. In the context of post-truth politics, relativist, post-structuralist, and social constructivist perspectives in the academy have come under increased scrutiny and criticism as being complicit in the right-wing predicament we find ourselves in (Krasni 2020; Ball 2017; Calcutt 2016; D’Ancona 2017; Davies 2017; Kakutani 2018; McIntyre 2018). Although the two positions are entirely distinct in their political orientations, the terrain on which some social constructivists and post-truth politicians do converge is one where knowledge may be reduced to a social construction that is legitimized as a regime of truth without the necessity of being referenced to an externally grounded reality. Such regimes are realized by the simple ideological advocacy and ritual adherence of communities alone. In the face of mounting criticism, some social constructivists previously taking a strong post-structuralist position have attempted to recalibrate their claims and to reclaim a normative commitment to judgement and the possibilities of scientific and ‘extra-discursive’ knowledge of the material world. Angermüller (2018), for instance, argues in an article titled ‘Truth after post-truth: For a strong programme in Discourse Studies’ that post-modern and post-structuralist forms of discourse analysis question the notion of truth and have been accused of ‘playing into the hands of Trump, Brexit and right-wing populists by politicising scientific knowledge and undermining the idea of scientific truth’ (p. 1). The author wants to avoid being associated with judgemental relativism but at the same time wants to retain what appears to be a quasi-post-structuralist, or what we will call a ‘non-truth’ weak poststructuralist, view of science and of ‘truths as discursive constructions’ (p. 1). He argues that we ‘do not have to return to Truth [or to] the assumption that some ideas are inherently better than others’ (p. 2) and that this ‘does not lead to a normative anything goes and moral relativism’ (p. 6). Angermüller deserves credit for openly addressing this problem but does not, in 63

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our view, provide a justification as to why discourse researchers, especially those taking a strong post-structuralist social constructivist view, should not think it is not possible to judge between better or worse outcomes or that one truth claim is just as acceptable as any other truth claim. It is because of the separation of oneself from judgemental rationalism by way of the denial of truth that post-structuralist and also weak post-structuralist social constructivism can give no compelling reason that one outcome or argument is to be preferred to any other outcome or argument. And yet, as Angermüller’s discussion demonstrates, there are increasingly few, if any, social constructivists who readily embrace the judgemental relativism which this seems to entail: ‘Discourse researchers can distinguish between truth claims with higher and lower normative quality without betraying their fundamental constructivist orientations’ (p. 2). In this somewhat contradictory manner, a commitment to ‘non-truth’ is still able to co-exist with a commitment to being able to make truth judgements, since the exercise of one’s judgement is not being denied. That said, ‘truths’ – as regularized formations and practices – are discursively constructed. We therefore see nothing very much wrong with conceiving of these kinds of ‘truth-practices’ as regimes of signification. But this is entirely different to saying that judgemental rationalism has no relevance or, in what amounts to the same thing, that we ‘do not have to return to Truth [or to] the assumption that some ideas are inherently better than others’ (Angermüller 2018: 2). On the contrary, some ideas and options are indeed inherently better than others and call for rational judgement. In this brief overview, it has been our wish to illustrate for the reader how a realist ontology in which the material world has its place can go some way towards resolving the dilemmas which we have identified once it is understood that there is no necessary contradiction between epistemic relativism (i.e. as a problematizing practice around knowledge claims) and the exercise of judgemental rationalism (i.e. as a commitment to social amelioration and the ability to choose between better or worse outcomes). To be sure, a commitment to judgemental rationality does not entail that one’s judgement is necessarily right – on the contrary. But it is only if we assume an external – social, material, and natural – reality to exist, that our human fallibleness as well as our possibility to make rational choices can be acknowledged. This is also why the critical discourse perspective we are advocating is grounded in the suggested theoretical affordances of CR.

Recommendations for practice That CDA/CDS/CALx are concerned with critical textual analysis is a truism, as the presented examples illustrate. Analysts adopt a variety of methods and perspectives in doing what they do. As Wodak and Meyer (2015) have noted in respect of CDA/CDS, ‘studies in CDS are multifarious, derived from quite different theoretical backgrounds, [and] oriented towards different data and methodologies’ (p. 5). Despite this multifariousness, a number of distinct perspectives exist, as we have noted. Amongst the more significant are those associated with a Marxism/ Foucauldianism/critical realism tradition in the dialectical-relational approach, a Habermasian communicative action/distorted communication tradition in the discourse-historical approach, a cognition/ideology tradition in the sociocognitive approach, and a decolonizing, problematizing, situated, collaborative perspective in CALx (Pennycook 2021). It is our recommendation that the reader refers to these traditions and to relevant cited works for examples of how CDA/ CDS/CALx has been done (see also O’Regan 2006; Montessori 2009; O’Regan and Betzel 2016; Zotzmann and O’Regan 2016; O’Regan and Gray 2018 for examples of some of the practical procedures which have been applied). 64

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Future directions CDA, CDS, and CALx are problem-oriented and interdisciplinary in nature and committed to social amelioration and change. This poses complex demands on analysts. As textual analysis is seen as an entry point into the analysis and explanation of a particular social ill and the role discourse/semiosis plays therein, there is a need to engage in depth with theories from other disciplines about the problem itself. The publications in the journals Discourse & Society and Critical Discourse Studies but also other outlets, such as monographs and textbooks, bear testimony to this interdisciplinarity. As we have argued in this chapter, in some instances, the power of discourse in relation to other causally effective mechanisms has been overrated. By paying more attention to ontological and not only epistemological questions, communication and collaboration across disciplinary borders could be enhanced, and CDA, CDS, and CALx could potentially make a greater impact. This leads us to a third element of this area of linguistic analysis: changing practices for the better. CDA has been criticized for focusing on the production and not the reception side of discourses and is thus not able to explain how discourses are reproduced, consumed, or challenged (Martín Rojo 2015). While this might be a valid criticism, there is also a danger in focusing too much on the micro techniques of power alone. We would argue instead that at the core of any critical project whose aim is social amelioration is the difference between what exists (being) and what could exist (becoming) but is not actualized yet (absence). Despite its fundamental role, the idea of what is absent, how the situation could be otherwise, and what difference a critical discourse analysis could potentially make might indeed need more attention.

Related topics critical applied linguistics; critical sociolinguistics; multimodal discourse analysis; forensic linguistics; corpus linguistics, linguistic anthropology

Further reading Pennycook, A. (2021) Critical Applied Linguistics: A Critical (Re)Introduction, 2nd ed., London: Routledge. (This chapter has primarily concerned itself with CDA/CDS and, to a lesser extent, with CALx. In this revised second edition, there is a notable change of emphasis in Pennycook’s position and makes this text a critical intervention in debates concerning the relationship between relativist and normative positions on discourse and its analysis. As Pennycook himself now states, ‘Critical applied linguistics must have a standpoint that critiques inequality’ (202 1: 20). This is a sentiment with which we also agree. Not only is it the basis for our shared critical attitude in CDA/CDS/CALx, but it is also potentially the pivot in applied linguistics and associated disciplines on which a new material unity in critical studies of discourse may turn.) Reisigl, M. (2020) ‘“Narrative!” I can’t hear that anymore: A linguistic critique of an overstretched umbrella term in cultural and social science studies, discussed with the example of the discourse on climate change’, Critical Discourse Studies, 18(3): 368–386. (This article offers a critique on analytical methods/methodologies regarding narratives through the analysis of climate change discourse. It takes issue with the overused concepts of narrative and narration in social and cultural science studies on climate change and argues for the need to acknowledge fallibility and judgemental rationality and hence the possibility of a more meaningful relationship with truth.) Sims-Schouten, W., Riley, S. and Willig, C. (2007) ‘Critical realism in discourse analysis: A presentation of a systematic female employment as an example method of analysis using women’s talk of motherhood, childcare and female employment as an example’, Theory and Psychology, 17(1): 101–124. (This article provides a useful demonstration of how CR principles concerning the stratified nature of reality can be applied in critical discourse studies.) 65

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References Adorno, T. W. (1973) Negative Dialectics (translated by E. B. Ashton), New York, NY: Seabury Press. Althusser, L. (1971) ‘Ideology and ideological state apparatuses’, in L. Althusser (ed.), Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, New York, NY: New Left Books, pp. 121–176. Angermüller, J. (2018) ‘Truth after post-truth: For a strong programme in Discourse Studies’, Palgrave Communications, 4(1): 30. www.nature.com/articles/s41599-018-0080-1 (accessed 5 October 2019). Archer, M. S. (2020) ‘Cultural wantons of the new millennium’, Journal of Critical Realism, 19(4): 314–328. Ball, J. (2017) Post-Truth: How Bullshit Conquered the World, London: Biteback. Baudrillard, J. (1994 [1981]) Simulacra and Simulation: The Body in Theory: Histories of Cultural Materialism, Michigan, MI: The University of Michigan Press. Bhaskar, R. (2002) Reflections on Meta-Reality: Transcendence, Emancipation and Everyday Life, New Delhi and London: Thousand Oaks and Sage. Bhaskar, R. (2008a [1975]) A Realist Theory of Science, London: Verso. Bhaskar, R. (2008b [1993]) Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom, London: Routledge. Bhaskar, R. (2016) Enlightened Common Sense: The Philosophy of Critical Realism, London: Routledge. Block, D. (2020) Post-Truth and Political Discourse, London: Palgrave. Calcutt, A. (2016) ‘The surprising origins of “post-truth”: And how it was spawned by the liberal left’, The Conversation, 18 November. https://theconversation.com/the-surprising-origins-of-post-truthand-how-it-was-spawned-by-the-liberal-left-68929 (accessed 5 April 2017). Catalano, T. and Waugh, L. R. (2020) Critical Discourse Analysis, Critical Discourse Studies and Beyond, Cham: Springer. Chouliaraki, L. and Fairclough, N. (1999) Discourse in Late Modernity: Rethinking Critical Discourse Analysis, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. D’Ancona, M. (2017) The New War on Truth and How to Fight Back, London: Ebury. Davies, E. (2017) Post-Truth: Why We Have Reached Peak Bullshit and What We Can Do about It, London: Little, Brown. Derrida, J. (1976) Of Grammatology (translated by G. C. Spivak), Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Fairclough, N. (1989) Language and Power, London: Longman. Fairclough, N. (2010) ‘A dialectical-relational approach to critical discourse analysis in social research’, in N. Fairclough (ed.), Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language, 2nd ed., Abington: Routledge, pp. 230–254. Fairclough, N., Jessop, B. and Sayer, A. (2004) ‘Critical realism and semiosis’, in J. Joseph and J. Roberts (eds.), Realism, Discourse and Deconstruction, London: Routledge, pp. 20–42. Foucault, M. (1977 [1975]) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, New York, NY: Pantheon. Foucault, M. (1989 [1969]) The Archaeology of Knowledge, London: Tavistock Publications. Fowler, R., Hodge, B., Kress, G. and Trew, T. (eds.) (1979) Language and Control, London: Boston and Henley. Gramsci, A. (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks (edited by Q. Hoare and G. Nowell Smith), London: Lawrence and Wishart. Habermas, J. (1971a) Knowledge and Human Interests, London: Heinemann. Habermas, J. (1971b) Toward a Rational Society, London: Heinemann. Harris Ali, S. and Kurasawa, J. (2020) ‘#COVID19: Social media both a blessing and a curse during coronavirus pandemic’, The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/covid19-social-media-botha-blessing-and-a-curse-during-coronavirus-pandemic-133596 (accessed 28 March 2020). Hartwig, M. (2011) ‘Bhaskar’s critique of the philosophical discourse of modernity’, Journal of Critical Realism, 10(4): 485–510. Herzog, B. (2016) ‘Discourse analysis as immanent critique: Possibilities and limits of normative critique in empirical discourse studies’, Discourse & Society, 27(3): 278–292. Hochschild, A. R. (2016) Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, New York, NY: The New Press. Hodge, B. and Kress, G. (1979) Language as Ideology, New York: Routledge. Kakutani, M. (2018) The Death of Truth: How We Gave Up on Facts and Ended Up with Trump, New York: Tim Duggan books. Koller, V. (2005) ‘Critical discourse analysis and social cognition: Evidence from business media discourse’, Discourse and Society, 16(2): 199–224. 66

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Krasni, J. (2020) ‘How to hijack a discourse? Reflections on the concepts of post-truth and fake news’, Humanities and Social Science Communication, 7(1): art. No 32: 1–10. Lyotard, J. (1984) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Malm, A. (2017) The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World, London: Verso. Marres, N. (2018) ‘Why we can’t have our facts back?’, Engaging Science, Technology, and Society, 4: 423–443. Martín Rojo, L. (2015) ‘Five Foucauldian postulates for rethinking language and power’, Urban Language and Literacy, 176: 1–22. Marx, K. (1998 [1845]) Theses on Feuerbach, New York, NY: Prometheus Books. McIntyre, L. (2018) Post-Truth, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Montessori, N. M. (2009) A Discursive Analysis of a Struggle for Hegemony in Mexico: The Zapatista Movement versus President Salinas de Gortari, Riga: VDM Verlag. Mulderrig, J. (2017) ‘Reframing obesity: A critical discourse analysis of the UK’s first social marketing campaign’, Critical Policy Studies, 11(4): 455–476. O’Regan, J. P. (2006) ‘The text as a critical object: On theorising exegetic procedure in classroom-based critical discourse analysis’, Critical Discourse Studies, 3(2): 179–209. O’Regan, J. P. (2021) Global English and Political Economy, London: Routledge. O’Regan, J. P. and Betzel, A. (2016) ‘Critical discourse analysis: A sample study of extremism’, in H. Zhu (ed.), Research Methods in Intercultural Communication: A Practical Guide, Malden, MA: WileyBlackwell, pp. 281–296. O’Regan, J. P. and Gray, J. (2018) ‘The bureaucratic distortion of academic work: A transdisciplinary analysis of the UK Research Excellence Framework in the age of neoliberalism’, Language and Intercultural Communication, 18(5): 533–548. Oreskes, N. and Conway, E. M. (2010) ‘Merchants of doubt’, in How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, London: Bloomsbury. Pennycook, A. (2001) Critical Applied Linguistics: A Critical Introduction, 1st ed., Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Pennycook, A. (2021) Critical Applied Linguistics: A Critical (Re)Introduction, 2nd ed., London: Routledge. Pomerantsev, P. (2019) This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War against Reality, London: Faber and Faber. Reisigl, M. (2020) ‘“Narrative!” I can’t hear that anymore’: A linguistic critique of an overstretched umbrella term in cultural and social science studies, discussed with the example of the discourse on climate change’, Critical Discourse Studies, 18(3): 368–386. Reisigl, M. and Wodak, R. (2001) Discourse and Discrimination: Rhetorics of Racism and Antisemitism, London: Routledge. Reisigl, M. and Wodak, R. (2015) ‘The discourse-historical approach’, in R. Wodak and M. Meyer (eds.), Methods of Critical Discourse Studies, 3rd ed., London: Sage, pp. 23–61. Sayer, A. (1999) Realism and Social Science, London: Sage. Van Dijk, T. A. (2008) Discourse and Context: A Sociocognitive Approach, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Van Dijk, T. A. (2015) ‘Critical discourse studies: A sociocognitive approach’, in R. Wodak and M. Meyer (eds.), Methods of Critical Discourse Studies, 3rd ed., London: Sage, pp. 63–85. Wodak, R. (2019) ‘Entering the “post-shame era”: The rise of illiberal democracy, populism and neoauthoritarianism in Europe’, Global Discourse, 9(1): 195–213. Wodak, R. (2020) ‘The boundaries of what can be said have shifted: An expert interview with Ruth Wodak’ (questions posed by Andreas Schulz), Discourse and Society, 31(2): 235–244. Wodak, R., de Cillia, R. and Reisigl, M. (1999) ‘The discursive construction of national identities’, Discourse and Society, 10(2): 149–173. Wodak, R. and Meyer, M. (2015) ‘Critical discourse analysis: History, agenda, theory, and methodology’, in R. Wodak and M. Meyer (eds.), Methods of Critical Discourse Studies, 3rd ed., London: Sage, pp. 1–33. Zotzmann, K. and O’Regan, J. P. (2016) ‘Critical discourse analysis and identity’, in S. Preece (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Language and Identity, London: Routledge, pp. 113–127. Zuboff, S. (2019) The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, London: Profile Books. 67

6 Digital language and communication Caroline Tagg

Introduction In the 21st century, an ever-increasing amount of our personal, professional, and public communication is mediated through technologies, from radio, television, and the landline to email, mobile phone messaging, social media, and video-conferencing. This chapter focuses primarily on ‘new’ or digital media, while recognizing that these co-exist in the contemporary media landscape with older technologies. We live in what Madianou and Miller (2012) call a ‘polymedia’ environment, in which we navigate affordances offered by different technologies and choose, for any instance of communication, the media that we feel best suits our communicative purpose and audience, reading meaning into the media choices made by others. As well as encompassing older and newer technologies, media communication in this polymedia environment can be more or less synchronous or asynchronous; mass or dyadic; top-down, commercialized, or grassroots; open or closed; written or spoken; or local or global. Different media forms can converge within the same platform or around the same media event so that a television programme is live-tweeted by viewers who might also discuss the show privately on WhatsApp and read online newspaper reviews. Importantly, despite initial perceptions of virtual communication as disembodied and separate from realworld concerns, it is increasingly recognized that digital communication is grounded in physical contexts, existing social networks, and wider identity projects, running parallel to and entangled with offline actions. For applied linguists with an interest in understanding real-world issues, linguistic investigations are increasingly likely to encompass digital language and communication. Their questions pertaining to the role of new media focus on how communication is shaped by its mediation through a particular technology and the implications for social practices in that context. Implicit in this focus is the understanding that the process of mediating communication will itself shape the communication that unfolds – its genre, register, participation frameworks, and so on. Thus, applied linguists have explored, for example, the role of mediated communication in language learning classrooms (Hampel 2019) and the workplace (Darics and Koller 2018), online consumer reviews (Chik and Vásquez 2017), corporate webcare strategies (Lutzky 2021), and health forums (Pounds 2018). Research has also explored how everyday 68

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social and domestic interaction is altered and expanded by its mediation through new technologies (Staehr and Nørreby 2021). This chapter explores the contributions of applied linguistics to understanding digital language and communication in a polymedia environment whilst also highlighting ways in which new media communication has informed and shaped thinking within applied linguistics. Importantly, the novelty of new media spaces and their apparent contrast to older forms of mediated communication have prompted applied linguists to revisit and reimagine established concepts such as context, community, identity, and language itself. This rethinking of key concepts has implications that go beyond the study of digital communication and language, with relevance for our understanding of the role of language in real-world issues more broadly.

Historical perspectives There has long been a concern within applied linguistics to situate new media communication within the wider history of communication technologies (Baron 2000; Tagg and Evans 2020). From a transhistorical perspective, the impact of digital technology, the Internet, and social media can be seen as developments within a broader arc of technology-related language change. Parallels can thus be drawn between new and old media communication, and continuities as much as divergences in practice identified (Bateman 2021). Lyons and Ounoughi (2020), for example, explore strategies for conveying location and motion across 19th-century Alpine narratives and WhatsApp mobile messaging, and O’Hagan and Spilioti (2021) compare the multimodal styling of self in present-day selfies and early 20th-century bookplates, highlighting similarities in design and identity construction despite being shaped by the ideological values of their time. In my own work, I have explored similarities in spelling variation in 16thcentury letters and early-21st-century text messaging (Evans and Tagg 2020). Such studies show how the enduring human need to communicate overrides technological specificity whilst highlighting the complex intersections between language, technology, and social practice: just as technologies shape how we can communicate, so does society shape the development and use of available technologies in sociohistorically contingent ways. Existing social practices are not transformed by technological developments but are remediated through new technologies (Bolter and Grusin 2000), and it is only with time that new practices emerge. Thus, the emergence and development of digital media is conceptualized less as a rupture from a pre-digital age and more a reconfiguration of past practices. The history of the Internet itself is emerging as an area of interest for media communication scholars (e.g. the journal Internet Histories, launched in 2017) and for applied linguists (Herring 2018; Tagg and Evans forthcoming). For example, van Driel (2018) explores the impact of the liveblog format in comparison to that of online newspaper articles on how readers perceive and respond to unfolding news events. Tied up in this emerging focus is an interest in the development of applied linguistics research into the Internet and the ways in which this research has been shaped not only by advances in technology – and associated social practices – but also by shifts and developments in scholarly thinking more generally. The history of language-related research into the Internet can be divided into three broadly defined overlapping waves or phrases (see Androutsopoulos 2006 on the first two of these). Herring (2018) starts her history of language-related research in 1983 with the emergence of the Internet from its predecessor, ARPANET, before the introduction of the web. In 1980s and 1990s, the Internet was dominated by elite North American English-speaking users and included email, Usenet, Internet Relay Chat, MUDs (virtual worlds known as multi-user 69

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domains), homepages, and blogs (weblogs). The early Internet was not a polymedia environment, because each Internet mode was operated by a standalone client, and so users rarely moved between them (Herring 2018). At this time, the Internet was largely text-based, and much scholarly interest lay in exploring how users playfully manipulated graphic resources such as punctuation and orthographic variation to fulfil pragmatic and interpersonal purposes (Danet et al. 1997). Of broad concern to applied linguists was the task of describing ‘the language of the Internet’ (Crystal 2001) and understanding how technological features shaped communication across modes, describing, for example, the language of weblogs (Herring et al. 2005) and placing them on a cline between written and spoken genres (Baron 1998). The concern was to understand how online communication differed from offline communication in terms of, for example, anonymity, identity, and community. Studies tended to be screen-based, and data came mainly from public sites mediated by computer. From around the turn of the millennium, there was a move away from the technologically deterministic approach that characterized much earlier work, towards a focus on users and an understanding that digital language was shaped not only by the technology but by social factors. In this second wave, the concept of affordances came to underpin applied linguistics research into media language, reconceptualizing technology as offering possibilities for social action as perceived by users. The Internet had spread from North America across the world and the term Web 2.0 was coined to capture the participatory, collaborative character of new media forms. There was thus a growing diversification of users and uses and a greater focus in applied linguistics research on sociolinguistic variation (Androutsopoulos 2006), multilingualism (Danet and Herring 2007), and language mixing (Deumert and Masinyana 2008), as well as identity and community. Although often predominantly screen-based, research began to incorporate interview data (Androutsopoulos 2008) and to explore how mediated communication fitted into users’ wider lives, prompted in part by the emergence of social network sites, which aimed to consolidate and expand people’s existing social networks, and by the increasingly multimodal nature of mediated communication, enabling people to share images and videos. There was also growing interest in mobile communication, largely in the form of private dyadic text messaging exchanges (Tagg 2009). In more recent years, a third wave of applied linguistics research has sought to grapple with communication in an increasingly complex networked society, within which people, artefacts, and ideas traverse between media platforms and offline sites (Androutsopoulos and Juffermans 2014). Research has increasingly attended to the visual character of media language, with a focus on graphicons such as emojis (Ge and Herring 2019), selfies (Zhao and Zappavigna 2018), and image-sharing (Venema and Lobinger 2020). Attention has been paid to video-mediated communication in the polymedia environment, such as video-conferencing platforms (Cerzö 2020; Sindoni 2018) and YouTube videos (Androutsopoulos and Tereick 2015). Multimodality has come to be viewed as fluid and dynamic (Thurlow et al. 2020), with a recognition that multiple semiotic resources are not only combined in sophisticated and contextually relevant ways within a social media platform but are also reconfigured and recontextualized across online and offline spaces (Leppänen et al. 2014) – for example, in the form of memes and GIFs (Kumar and Varier 2020). The increasing convergence not only of old and new media into the same platform but also of commercial and grassroots discourse opens up globally circulating cultural artefacts for local recontextualization and appropriation whilst giving ordinary people a public voice. Meanwhile, the growing dominance of the mobile phone enables people to access platforms and apps while on the move and engaged in offline activities, meaning that individuals are co-present in multiple intertwining online and offline contexts (Lyons and Tagg 2019). This fluidity, convergence, and mobility has implications for 70

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understanding everyday personal and social communication (Staehr and Nørreby 2021), as well as the unfolding of participatory media events (Giaxoglou and Spilioti 2020).

Critical issues and current contributions The study of media language and communication over the last 40 years has foregrounded several critical issues with implications for broader understandings of language-in-use. In this section, I focus on current contributions to context, identity, and multimodality. In media and communication studies, ‘context’ has long been recognized as a complex element of mediated communication. Early Internet research tended to treat mediated spaces as devoid of place (Meyrowitz 1985), virtual and disembodied. Subsequent research argued that mediated communication involved the bringing together of multiple places into one communicative space: a ‘doubling of place’ (Moores 2004). According to this view, people who communicate through new media are located both in their physical location(s) and in the shared communicative context created by the mediated exchange. These somewhat static views of context have been challenged by applied linguists, for whom the context of interaction does not exist a priori to communicative action but is a dynamic social category in its own right. Their research details how online social spaces are interactionally accomplished and navigated through discursive means. Jones (2010), for example, shows how Hong Kong students distribute social attention across multiple tasks and interactions – moving fluidly between playing online games, doing homework, attending to co-present family members, and instant messaging with friends – and how their ‘polyfocal attention structures’ (p. 159) serve to ground their virtual interactions in the immediate physical context. More recent studies find that mobile devices further encourage this fluid engagement with online and offline environments (Cohen 2015). Lyons (2014) shows how texters position themselves discursively at the multiple locations made relevant through texting, shifting between their deictic centre and that of their interlocutor, as well as a shared virtual space. She also shows how texters make relevant their physical contexts – and appeal to interlocutors’ lived experiences – through the discursive enactment of non-verbal behaviours, or kineticons (Lyons 2018). Such studies challenge the validity of distinguishing between offline and online contexts when making sense of how individuals communicate and suggest instead that mediated communication be seen as embedded in wider shifting contexts, characterized by mobility and polyfocality. Bakhtin’s chronotope has been applied to new media environments in language-related work, to acknowledge the fluidity with which interactants handle the multiple time-space arrangements that unfold simultaneously across mediated and physical spaces. Chronotopes are spatiotemporally determined frames, which sanction particular interaction patterns and modes of behaviour and which can be invoked in interaction by participants through the deployment of contextualization cues, so as to frame the ensuing discourse (Blommaert and De Fina 2017). Chronotopes are neither fixed nor pre-determined but co-constructed by interactants in active, purposeful processes and are thus subject to ongoing evaluation, shifts, and alterations. A chronotopic analysis captures the ways in which individuals negotiate shared virtual communicative time-spaces during mediated interactions in which they are physically separated with access to different physical contexts (Lyons and Tagg 2019). Sandel and Wangchuk (2020), for example, explore how dispersed followers of a Buddhist temple in Bhutan draw on a religious chronotopic framing in co-constructing an online Buddhist community on WeChat through various languages and modalities. In these ways, applied linguistics research details how social processes are managed in the micro-contexts of everyday mediated communications. 71

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A second critical issue is that of identity. Digital language research has been pivotal in forwarding our understanding of discursive identity construction. Early research into digital media reflected the prevailing idea that the Internet was a liberating, democratizing space where offline identities could be discarded and new ones assumed (Bechar-Israeli 1995). With the development of social media and mobile devices came greater scholarly recognition of the ways in which individuals discursively perform identities across online and offline contexts in accomplishing locally relevant communicative activities. Vásquez (2014), for example, shows how online reviewers on TripAdvisor foreground particular elements of identity in order to persuade readers through identifying with them and displaying expertise. The online construction of expert identities among non-professionals in review sites (Escarena 2020), online health settings (Rudolf van Rohr et al. 2019), and WhatsApp groups (Lyons 2020) has attracted particular attention, as users exploit offline experiences and online affordances to legitimate their advice-sharing on real-world issues. Central to this emerging understanding of online identity are notions of authenticity (Leppänen et al. 2015) and credibility (Meer and Staubach 2020) – how these are indexed, negotiated, and challenged; the range of semiotic resources mobilized in everyday processes of authentication; and the role such processes play in constructing identities which traverse multiple online and offline spaces. Meer and Staubach (2020), for example, explore how social media influencers construct credible identities through visual and embodied resources – including object placement and manipulation – in order to effectively promote commercial products to their followers. This perspective recognizes the polycentric nature of identity construction – the way in which interactants orient towards and shift between multiple norms or centres of authority which provide a frame for their behaviour and self-positioning (Blommaert 2013). The perceived novelty of online identity construction has helped foreground an approach to understanding identity with relevance beyond digital communication. Thirdly, recent years have seen a ‘multimodal turn’ in applied linguistics studies of digital language and communication. This is part of a recognition of the multimodal nature of all human communication and the development of methodological approaches, such as social semiotics, which widen the applied linguistic gaze. The multimodal turn has simultaneously gained impetus from the increasingly multi-semiotic nature of mediated communication, as text-based forums have given way to media-sharing sites – YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok, as well as mobile messaging apps, such as WhatsApp and WeChat – which provide access to an array of preconfigured sets of multimodal resources or graphicons such as emojis, stickers, and GIFs. Multimodality also emerges from digital photography and the ease with which networked resources can be copied and shared. As with identity research, the apparent salience of multimodality online has played a key role in shaping the development of multimodality studies in applied linguistics, which has since the turn of the millennium been dominated by the study of digital media (Sindoni and Moschini 2021). The contemporary polymedia environment offers a challenge to ‘traditional’ approaches to multimodality: How can applied linguists document and explain the complex ways in which multimodal assemblages are co-constructed, shared, and recontextualized across time and space? How can applied linguists account for the multiple ways in which diverse semiotic resources are interactionally taken up and used in identification and relational processes? Venema and Lobinger (2020) detail how photo-sharing enables the representation and expression of self, arguing that the materialization of memories is a key resource for maintaining close relationships. Zhao and Zappavigna (2018) show how photos and videos of users’ physical contexts not only provide a direct window onto an individual’s world, but they index users’ perspective on a situation through gaze, proximity, and framing. Jones (2019) argues that mobile photography goes beyond the representation of perspective to communicate ‘the embodied experience of the 72

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visual’ (p. 22) – that is, to involve others in the physical experience of being there and conferring on them ‘the right to look’. Meanwhile, studies of video-mediated communication have been pivotal in developing transcription and annotation systems that decentre verbal language and integrate multiple modes (Sindoni 2018).

Main research methods Applied linguistics research into media language and communication has generally adopted existing research methods, ‘fine-tuning, creatively adapting or even radically redefining them to suit the needs and complexities of the digital environments’ (Georgakopoulou and Spilioti 2015: 4). For example, MOOD (microanalysis of online data) explores the extent to which, and how, conversation analytic concepts can be used to understand online interaction (Giles et al. 2017), describing exchanges as sequentially organized in ways that both resemble and depart from spoken conversations (König 2019). One contrast between online and face-to-face conversations is the former’s lack of synchronicity, in the sense that message production and reception do not occur simultaneously, and receivers do not have access to a sender’s message until it is fully formed and sent (Garcia and Baker Jacobs 1999). As a result, the constraints that shape face-to-face interaction do not apply; messages can be produced and sent at any time, and there is no need for interlocutors to negotiate or compete for the ‘conversational floor’ (Beißwenger 2008). Rather than adjacency pairs, digital conversations are thus more accurately characterized by what König (2019) calls ‘paired actions’, in which a first part anticipates a second part which may be neither temporally nor spatially adjacent. These and other conditions of digital communication mean that the precepts of existing methodologies must be reworked to have relevance in mediated contexts. Digital technologies have enabled applied linguists to both harness and exploit the opportunities offered by big data whilst also enabling and enriching ethnographic insights into contemporary life. Within digital ethnographies, the nature of online context as described earlier – networked, interactive, ambient – challenges the ethnographic assumption of a bounded and clearly demarcated field site and the importance of long-term immersion in a particular place. The discourse-oriented online ethnography proposed by Androutsopoulos (2008) involves a reworking of participant observation as a form of ‘systematic observation’ which moves from a core discursive site – a platform such as YouTube, a Facebook group, or a wall event – outwards through a set of interconnections towards the periphery of the field site, following the online trajectories of people, practices, discourses, or semiotic resources. Unlike observation in physical settings, the researcher does not necessarily gain access to the production of posts or online text or see interactions as they unfold in real time. Also unlike ‘offline’ observation, digital ethnographers can assume the role of a ‘lurker’, reading messages and posts but not posting their own and thus invisible to other users. However, rather than being seen as departures from ethnography traditionally conceived, these challenges have problematized established assumptions, drawing attention to the fact that social life is never bounded within one physical context but is always characterized by mobility and networks that transcend particular spaces. Discourse-oriented online ethnographies highlight the insights gained by situating digital communications within individuals’ wider communicative practices and exploring the ways in which individuals move across online and offline spaces. For example, in their study of young adults at the global periphery in Bangladesh and Mongolia, Dovchin et al. (2018) engaged not only in online observation on Facebook but also hung out with the students, asked them to record themselves, held informal discussions with them, and interviewed them repeatedly, to 73

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explore how their transglossic practices – expressions of voice which challenge social and linguistic boundaries – emerged from the intersections between socioeconomic background and digital participation. In a mobile, multi-sited ethnography, Nordquist (2017) followed students across their everyday movements between home, educational institutions, workplaces, social media, transit, and elsewhere, to unpack the complex ways in which they exploited multiple literacies and resources to conform to and challenge dominant conventions and to understand how their literacy practices were informed by their wider backgrounds, beliefs, and aspirations. From this perspective, and with the growing use of mobile devices such as smartphones, linguistic digital ethnography becomes not so much a matter of moving methods online but incorporating mediated interactions into investigation of participants’ physical settings. Corpus approaches to digital language (Dayter and Rüdiger 2020) can be seen as motivated in varying degrees by two concerns: to understand how communication is shaped or extended by digital media (Hiippala et al. 2019) or to obtain a convenient data source to shed light on existing sociolinguistic variation (Gauthier 2021) – or sometimes both. For example, Grieve et al. (2018) exploit a multi-billion-word corpus of American tweets to map the spread of lexical innovations such as baeless (a single person) and rekt (wrecked or intoxicated) across the United States, visualizing the findings through multivariate spatial analysis. Access to this big data source enables them to confirm predicted patterns of diffusion, such as the role of large densely populated urban areas in lexical innovation, but also reveals how the mediated context shapes patterns of lexical innovation. For example, because of the relatively high engagement of African Americans on Twitter, the southern US city of Atlanta emerges as an important origin of new forms (Grieve et al. 2018). As this study shows, quantitative approaches enable applied linguists to harness the metadata attached to online data, mapping user location, and the distribution of posts across social networks. For example, Hiippala et al. (2019) collected a corpus of geo-coded Instagram posts to explore the virtual linguistic landscape centred around a physical cultural landmark, Senate Square in Helsinki, Finland. However, despite the strengths of big data in revealing patterns in language use, quantitative approaches alone cannot explain how and why users draw on linguistic features to construct identities discursively. Applied linguists are only beginning to explore how multimodal resources can be incorporated into quantitative linguistic analysis (O’Halloran et al. 2021) and how quantitative and qualitative analysis can be combined to overcome these limitations (Georgakopoulou 2019). Digital language and communication research, both qualitative and quantitative, raises new ethical challenges for applied linguists. One issue concerns the reliance on naturally occurring data, together with – or rather than – surveys or interviews, for which gaining informed consent is arguably more straightforward. For example, although in principle applied linguists can assume that the need for informed consent and protection of identities depends in part on a distinction between public and private sites (Page et al. 2014: 65), privacy cannot be defined solely in terms of platform architecture and user settings. Online users often assume and experience privacy even when interacting in online spaces that are publicly open (Mackenzie 2017). With neither the site architecture nor users’ practices as reliable indicators of privacy, researchers must instead seek to understand how their participants interpret privacy and reflect on the extent to which the researcher’s use of the discourse as data breaches participants’ expectations regarding the trajectory of their online content. A second ethical challenge for applied linguists lies in their reproduction and dissemination of directly quoted extracts, concordances, and original images. Extracts from online data reproduced in research publications can be used to locate the original online context, even in apparently private spaces with end-to-end encryption, leading to the potential reidentifying of individuals. In much Internet research, this risk can be addressed by avoiding direct quotation 74

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and instead blurring words, paraphrasing, translating, and manipulating images. However, this may be harder to justify in applied linguistics research for which precise wording or specific multimodal choices are key. These and other challenges confirm the need for an approach to research ethics as a contextualized process of decision-making throughout the research process (Spilioti and Tagg 2022).

Future directions Future directions will depend on technological developments and the reconfigured social practices that emerge from and shape media development. However, it is possible to pinpoint areas for greater attention. Here, I identify two such areas: greater criticality and a move towards a post-digital approach which recognizes the inherently mediated nature of much contemporary human communication. On the one hand, future research needs to find ways to acknowledge the role of online platforms in constraining the kinds of communication that can take place. Existing critical discourse studies of digital communication combine linguistic analysis with sociopolitical critique, critically examining the flows of information in networked societies, including the spread of misinformation, the role of micro-celebrities and influencers, and the ways in which digital media are exploited for purposes of parody, political stance-taking, and identity positioning. A growing body of research investigates the use of the Internet for hate speech and mobilization by far-right and misogynistic communities (KhosraviNik and Esposito 2018), as well as online paedophile activities (Chiang and Grant 2019). However, as Sindoni and Moschini (2021) put it, such practices are but the ‘tip of the iceberg’ in terms of a critical understanding of online power relations. As Georgakopoulou and Spilioti (2015: 3) argue, research must focus attention on the ways in which online activities are shaped in invisible ways by prevailing ideologies (Ledin and Machin 2021), metrics and hidden algorithms (Georgakopoulou et al. 2019), commercial agendas, clickbait, and advertising imperatives. Djonov and van Leeuwen (2018), for example, put forward a critical multimodal framework to explore how the ‘built-in semiotic regimes’ of social media platforms – by which embedded resources are made accessible and regulated – intersect with communicative norms and shape social practice. In their social semiotic analysis of the academic network site, ResearchGate, they find that its design is driven by commercial interests, encouraging speedy quantifiable evaluations at the expense of deep critical engagement. Jones (2020) outlines what he calls ‘algorithmic pragmatics’, exploring the extent to which ‘analogue pragmatics’ is relevant to online communication shaped by algorithms – computer codes that guide responses to human actions – and how existing frameworks can be adapted to account for this. He points, for instance, to the discrepancy in how humans and algorithms infer meaning from context: while humans rely on negotiating shared frames of reference, algorithms base inferences on access to a vast network of interlinked contexts, making connections that are beyond human capabilities and often guided by commercial interests. As Jones argues, applied linguists have a role to play in equipping people with digital literacies to engage critically with the processes shaping their mediated communication (Androutsopoulos 2021). On the other hand, whilst recognizing the ways in which media communication is shaped by design decisions and site architecture, future research needs also to attend to the intersections between digital media, older forms of media, and the physical world, building on existing ethnographic work (Dovchin et al. 2018; Nordquist 2017) to develop ways in which the digital can be understood as part of individuals’ wider lived experiences. Elsewhere I refer to this as a post-digital approach, which recognizes that digital technologies are no longer disruptive 75

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but experienced as an inherent part of being human (Tagg and Lyons 2022). A post-digital approach involves the honing of methodologies and analytical frameworks to explore the multilayered, polyfocal communicative encounters of networked individuals across spaces. Such research should be multimodal and multisensorial, building on conversation analytic work into the role of sensory practices of gaze and touch in accomplishing social action (Mondada 2018) to explore the role of digital devices as tactile objects in the real world and how material and embodied experience is entangled in and shapes media engagement (Jewitt et al. 2020). In my own research, I approach a post-digital scenario through the notion of repertoire, focusing on how semiotic multimodal resources, registers, and media are deployed by networked individuals across offline and online spaces (Tagg and Lyons 2022). This line of research shows how people, material objects, virtual artefacts, discourses, devices, platforms, and apps come together to make meaning at a time when much of our communication – at home, school, or work; in the street; and on the move – is mediated by digital technologies.

Related topics technology and language learning; identity; social semiotics and multimodality; language and materiality; languaging and translanguaging

Further reading Androutsopoulos, J. (ed.) (2021) ‘Digital language practices: Media, awareness, pedagogy’, Special issue in Linguistics and Education, 62. (This special issue explores the implications of digital media for critical digital literacies education, with a focus on language/media ideologies and perspectives from the UK, Germany, Italy, Mongolia, and Bangladesh.) Bou-Franch, P. and Garcés Blitvich, P. (eds.) (2019) Analyzing Digital Discourse: New Insights and Future Directions, London: Palgrave. (This edited collection lays out the state of the art of studies of digital discourse and suggests future directions, with a focus on multimodality, identity, and media ideologies.) Makalela, L. and White, G. (eds.) (2021) Rethinking Language Use in Digital Africa: Technology and Communication in Sub-Saharan Africa, Bristol: Multilingual Matters. (This collection of studies sheds light on the use of digital media across Africa, with implications for policy and the development of an African perspective on media communication.) Sindoni, M. G. and Moschini, I. (eds.) (2021) ‘What’s past is prologue’, Article Collection in Discourse, Context & Media. www.sciencedirect.com/journal/discourse-context-and-media/specialissue/1084S24MG9M. (This special issue problematizes the state of the art on media communication by questioning the novelty of digital practices and how they should be tackled epistemologically.) Thurlow, C., Durscheid, C. and Diémoz, F. (eds.) (2020) Visualising Digital Discourse: Interactional, Institutional and Ideological Perspectives, Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. (This edited volume brings together language and communication researchers dedicated to understanding multimodality in the context of digital media, with a focus not only on everyday interaction but also institutional practices and semiotic ideologies.)

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Lyons, A. (2020) ‘Negotiating the expertise paradox in new mothers’ WhatsApp group interactions’, Discourse, Context & Media, 37: 100427. Lyons, A. and Ounoughi, S. (2020) ‘Towards a transhistorical approach to analysing discourse about and in motion’, in C. Tagg and M. Evans (eds.)., Message and Medium: English Language Practices across Old and New Media, Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton, pp. 89–111. Lyons, A. and Tagg, C. (2019) ‘The discursive construction of mobile chronotopes in mobile-phone messaging’, Language in Society, 48(5): 657–683. Mackenzie, J. (2017) ‘Identifying informational norms in Mumsnet Talk: A reflexive-linguistic approach to internet research ethics’, Applied Linguistics Review, 8(2–3): 293–314. Madianou, M. and Miller, D. (2012) ‘Polymedia: Towards a new theory of digital media in interpersonal communication’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 16(2): 169–187. Meer, D. and Staubach, K. (2020) ‘Social media influencers’ advertising targeted at teenagers: The multimodal constitution of creativity’, in C. Thurlow, C. Durscheid and F. Diémoz (eds.), Visualising Digital Discourse: Interactional, Institutional and Ideological Perspectives, Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, pp. 245–269. Meyrowitz, J. (1985) No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, New York: Oxford University Press. Mondada, L. (2018) ‘The multimodal interactional organization of tasting: Practices of tasting cheese in gourmet shops’, Discourse Studies, 20(6): 743–769. Moores, S. (2004) ‘The doubling of place: Electronic media, time-space arrangements and social relationships’, in N. Couldry and A. McCarthy (eds.), MediaSpace: Place, Scale and Culture in a Media Age, London: Routledge, pp. 21–36. Nordquist, B. (2017) Literacy and Mobility: Complexity, Uncertainty, and Agency at the Nexus of High School and College, New York: Routledge. O’Hagan, L. A. and Spilioti, T. (2021) ‘The edwardian selfies: A transhistorical approach to celebrity culture and pictorial bookplates’, Discourse, Context & Media, 43: 100522. O’Halloran, K. L., Pal, G. and Jin, M. (2021) ‘Multimodal approach to analysing big social and news media data’, Discourse, Context & Media, 40: 100467. Page, R., Barton, D., Unger, J. W. and Zappavigna, M. (2014) Researching Language and Social Media: A Student Guide, London: Routledge. Pounds, G. (2018) ‘Patient-centred communication in ask-the-expert healthcare websites’, Applied Linguistics, 39(2): 117–134. Rudolf von Rohr, M.-T., Thurnherr, F. and Locher, M. A. (2019) ‘Linguistic expert creation in online health practices’, in P. Bou-Franch and P. Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (eds.), Analysing Digital Discourse: New Insights and Future Directions, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 219–250. Sandel, T. and Wangchuk, D. (2020) ‘“Thank you for your blessing”: Constructed mobile chronotopes in a Buddhist online community in Bhutan’, Language & Communication, 75: 36–50. Sindoni, M. G. (2018) ‘“Of course I’m married!” Communicative strategies and transcription-related issues in video-mediated interactions’, in P. Bou-Franch and P. Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (eds.), Analyzing Digital Discourse: New Insights and Future Directions, London: Palgrave, pp. 71–104. Sindoni, M. G. and Moschini, I. (2021) ‘Discourses on discourse, shifting contexts and digital media’, Discourse, Context & Media, 43: 100534. Spilioti, T. and Tagg, C. (2022) ‘Research ethics’, in C. Vasquez (ed.), Research Methods for Digital Discourse Analysis, London: Bloomsbury, pp. 91–114. Staehr, A. C., and Nørreby, T. R. (2021) ‘The metapragmatics of mode choice’, Pragmatics and Society, 12(5): 756–781. Tagg, C. (2009) A Corpus Analysis of SMS Text Messages. Unpublished PhD thesis. University of Birmingham. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk/253/1/Tagg09PhD.pdf (accessed 25 May 2021). Tagg, C. and Evans, M. (2020) Message and Medium: English Language Practices across Old and New Media, Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. Tagg, C. and Evans, M. (forthcoming) ‘Digital interaction in the history of English’, in J. Beal (ed.), New Cambridge History of the English Language, vol 3, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tagg, C. and Lyons, A. (2022) Mobile Messaging and Resourcefulness: A Post-Digital Ethnography, Abingdon: Routledge. Thurlow, C., Durscheid, C. and Diémoz, F. (eds.) (2020) Visualising Digital Discourse: Interactional, Institutional and Ideological Perspectives, Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.

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7 Intercultural communication Zhu Hua

Introduction Intercultural communication (IC) is a field of research that cross-cuts many well-established scholarly fields, including applied linguistics, communication studies, social psychology, anthropology, cultural studies, sociology, education, and sociolinguistics, due to their intellectual connections and shared interests in culture, communication, and group relations. Over the years, different definitions of IC have emerged, reflecting changing conceptualizations of culture, research priorities of the time and different disciplinary orientations. The traditional and often cited definition of IC as studies of both interaction between people from different cultural and ethnic backgrounds and comparative studies of communication patterns across cultures has given way to more nuanced definitions. For example, to foreground a more dynamic and situated approach to meaning- and identity-making and individuals’ agency, Zhu (2014) defined IC as a process of negotiating meaning, relevance of cultural identities, and differences between ourselves and others. Within applied linguistics, seeing culture as membership of a discourse community and IC as interdiscourse communication – that is, communication between members of different discourse systems (Scollon and Scollon 1995; Kramsch 1998; see Kramsch, this Handbook, Volume 1) – has gained traction. The discourse approach has been very helpful in providing a much-needed framework for recognizing and embracing heterogeneity and intersectionality of cultural memberships – culture is no longer just about nationality and ethnicity and one can belong to several discourse communities simultaneously. This chapter reviews these shifts in conceptualization and methodological positioning within IC, discusses contributions of applied linguistics to the field of IC, and explores future directions.

Historical perspectives The first milestone in the development of IC as a field is often attributed to the success and influence of Edward Hall and his linguist colleagues, George Trager and Ray Birdwhistell, in setting up a training course for the American Foreign Service Institute (FSI), to prepare diplomats and business personnel before their overseas trips in the post second world war DOI: 10.4324/9781003082637-9

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period (e.g. Leeds-Hurwitz 1990; cf. Kulich et al. 2020). Through interdisciplinary collaboration and a vision to foreground the role of culture (otherwise seen as ‘hidden’ or ‘silent’) in communication, Hall and his colleagues made a convincing case for the importance of culture in communication and international relations. They also demonstrated how to bridge academic endeavours and professional training and education. While the vision of Hall and his colleagues’ work remains central to the field of IC today, Kulich et al. (2020) warn us against the danger of a ‘single story’ (Adichie 2009). Indeed, the intellectual roots of IC and earlier interventions could be traced back to several disciplinary fields before Hall, as documented in Kulich et al. 2020. One is cultural anthropology, known for its emic, interpretive approach to culture, as seen in a number of influential works on Indigenous cultures (e.g. Margaret Mead’s 1928 volume with the title of Coming of Age in Samoa) or ‘national character’ (e.g. The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture by Benedict 1946). Another related area of work came from race and ethnicity studies aiming to understand group identities and intercultural/ interethnic relations. Examples include Gordon Allport’s contact hypothesis (Allport 1954), which proposes that contact and cooperation among groups under certain conditions, such as having equal status and shared goals, decrease stereotypes and prejudice, and W. E. B. Du Bois’ notion of ‘double consciousness’ (1903), which illustrates the struggle faced by African Americans in seeing themselves through the eyes of others. The third area is intercultural education initiatives led by Rachel Davis-DuBois and her successors through a resource centre, Service Bureau for Intercultural Education, and ‘the Group Conversation Method’ (Davis-DuBois 1946) to promote intercultural understanding among youth and the local communities in order to achieve integration as opposed to assimilation. These are just some of the examples of the areas that have shaped IC as a field and have characterized its inter- and multidisciplinary nature. To move beyond the ‘single-story’ bias, we also need to recognize that the current historical accounts of IC are largely synthesized based on what is available or accessible in a ‘single language’ (i.e. English) and a ‘single geographical area’ (i.e. The United States (US) with some occasional recognition of the contribution from the Europe). A global look at the history and development of language and IC studies by Martin et al. (2020) is a good starting point for an overview of the diverse trajectories of IC research in different regions. Some examples of major impetus for the development of IC research include: the acute need to rebuild connections with the rest of the world and to grow their economic power in the aftermath of the Second World War in Japan; the political debates on immigration and integration of diverse ethnic groups, the establishment of the Erasmus programme in 1987, and the development of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) in Europe; and the need to train speakers of other languages and to facilitate international exchanges in China. These local conditions spurred the expansion, as well as diversification, of IC research across time and space. Martin et al. (2020) acknowledged the contribution of applied linguistics to IC studies in foregrounding the role of language in intercultural encounters and the role of IC in language education, as well as in developing an interpretive research paradigm. Within applied linguistics, IC research agendas have expanded from searching for culture-specific discourse strategies and communication styles (e.g. interactionalist sociolinguistics, such as Gumperz 1978, 1982) and language and intercultural education (e.g. Byram 1989, 1997; Feng et al. 2009) in the early days to a more historically situated and politically sensitive examination of the process of IC in a variety of contexts in more recent years. 82

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Critical issues and topics An epistemological issue facing IC research relates to theories about cultural differences. There are two significant paradigms. One could be characterized as ‘searching for cultural differences’. This paradigm was born out of the need to make the case for ‘culture as communication’ in the early days, as exemplified in Hall (1959: 186). A number of noticeable works within applied linguistics followed this paradigm. They tended to start with identifying ‘differences’ between cultures and then attempted to account for those differences. For example, Robert Lado’s Linguistics Across Cultures (1957) was the first attempt to make the case for a systematic comparison of differences across languages and cultures for language learning. The contrastive study on writing patterns by Robert Kaplan (1966), probably best known for his doodle drawings of different ‘cultural thought patterns’, is influential in advancing ideas about cultural differences in writing, but it was later critiqued for being ethnocentric and essentialist. The identification of cultural differences in interactional and discourse strategies has benefited from increasing attention to context, of which culture is an important factor, among interactional sociolinguists. Studies such as Gumperz (1978, 1982) and Tannen (1984) sought to identify differences in the ways people of different ethnicities or genders manage conversations in terms of frames of interpretation and communicative styles, such as ‘high involvement’ and ‘indirectness’. (This approach is known as ‘difference theory’.) Within pragmatics, there was similar interest in cultural approaches to language use. Various theoretical constructs, such as politeness and face (Scollon et al. 2012), rapport (Spencer-Oatey 2002) and cultural scripts (Goddard and Wierzbicka 2004), are proposed to demonstrate different ‘cultural’ ways of speaking. Meanwhile, research in cross-cultural pragmatics, inspired by the first influential systematic investigation into similarities and differences in the realization patterns of the same speech acts across different languages (the Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realisation Patterns project, Blum-Kulka and Olshtain 1984), produced a large quantity of empirical evidence to illustrate differences in communication patterns across cultures. This paradigm of searching for cultural differences, along with the increasing number of publications on cultural know-how for the general public, have raised awareness of cultural differences in communication – the very mission Hall and his colleagues set out to achieve in the 1950s. The second paradigm can be described as politics of cultural differences. In this paradigm, the focus is not on cultural differences themselves but on how differences are constructed. Thornton (1988) argues that cultural understanding should not be ‘simply a knowledge of differences, but rather an understanding of how and why differences in language, thought, use of materials and behaviours has come about’ (p. 27). Therefore, the focus should be about understanding meanings, functions, and histories of differences rather than using the apparent ‘fact’ of differences to explain history, politics, and beliefs. As an example, Thornton illustrates that the perceived differences between British and Zulu cultures need to be understood through three perspectives: historical products of social stress and warfare in the era of British empire-building, the outcome of the increased coherence of both British and Zulu societies through (forced) contact, and the continuum of cultural ideas and practices across the two locations, fossilized through various means of knowledge dissemination dominant in the West (i.e. books). Against this context, there have been a number of efforts to shift the focus from culture-specific communication pattens to dialectic relationships between social structures and linguistic practices (e.g. Sarangi 1994). Scollon and Scollon (2001) have called for a mediated discourse approach, seeking to reconstitute the research agenda of IC around social action rather than categorial memberships or cultural differences. For them, cultural memberships do not have 83

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direct causal status in themselves. They only become problematic when they are shown to ‘be productive of ideological contradiction’ or when ‘the participants themselves call upon social group membership in making strategic claims within the actions under study’. Thus, they argue that the analyst should ask the following: ‘How does the concept of culture arise in these social actions? Who has introduced culture as a relevant category, for what purposes and with what consequences?’ (Scollon and Scollon 2001: 545). These new perspectives on culture have opened up a range of new lines of investigation among language and IC researchers. One is the exploration of how identities and cultural memberships are constructed through interactions, also known as interculturality through interaction research. Another is the interrogation of the ideological processes underlying IC, which is broadly referred to as ‘critical intercultural communication’ research. This line of research examines the impact of structures of power and socioeconomic relations and ideologies on IC, exemplified in The Handbook of Critical Intercultural Communication edited by Nakayama and Halualani (2010) and a collection of articles in a special issue edited by Zhu and Kramsch (2016) on the theme of symbolic power and conversational inequality in intercultural communication. Zhu et al. (2022) further argue to (re)focus attention to the way acts of distinction (i.e. explicit marking, accentuating, and legitimatization of cultural differences, building on Bourdieu’s notion of distinction, 1984, 1991) function in everyday encounters in the wider context of the social, political, and racial polarization that has characterized the 2020s. They illustrate how the notion of acts of distinction, supported with principles from interactional sociolinguistics and moment analysis, can help us understand the dynamics of domination in vivo and the way that differences are imposed, resisted, and negotiated in situated social interactions.

Current contributions and research Globalization, the changing dynamics of geopolitics, and, more recently, the COVID-19 pandemic and rising nationalism have heightened the significance of intercultural issues in almost every aspect of daily life. Some of the latest debates and contributions within applied linguistics are summarized here.

Where is culture in language learning and teaching? What are the goals of language and culture learning? The complex relationship between language and culture has been a major concern of research into the role of culture in language teaching and learning. Debates have been centred around the extent to which we should pay attention to the role of culture in language learning and teaching and what constitutes the goals of language and culture learning. Byram, together with his colleagues, played an instrumental role in the so-called cultural turn in language teaching in the 1990s, placing culture at centre stage in language and culture pedagogy. In his early model for foreign language teaching, Byram (1989) includes cultural awareness, cultural experience, and language awareness in addition to language learning. He believes that the goal of language teaching and learning lies in developing the learner’s intercultural communicative competence (ICC), which includes knowledge, skills of interpreting and relating, attitudes (curiosity and openness), skills of discovery and interaction, and critical cultural awareness. Kramsch (2009) sees the purpose of language teaching and learning as developing multilingual and intercultural subjects. She argues that language teaching and learning creates a ‘third culture’, a metaphor for the ultimate outcome where learners combine their own and others’ 84

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cultures through language learning. She emphasizes the significance of in-between spaces and the need for language teaching to respond to the changing social and political conditions. Kramsch later reframes the ‘third culture’ as ‘symbolic competence’, to foreground the ability ‘not only to approximate or appropriate for oneself someone else’s language, but to shape the very context in which the language is learned and used through the learner’s and other’s embodied history and subjectivity’ (Kramsch and Whiteside 2008: 664). Crucially, symbolic competence consists of an ability to frame and reframe the distribution of symbolic power in conversational encounters, knowing when to speak and when to remain silent, when to talk about the inequality of the ongoing talk and when to let them pass, when to complain or counter-attack, and when to gently but unmistakably readjust the balance of power through humor or irony. (Kramsch 2016: 526) Liddicoat (2014) envisages language teaching and learning as an intercultural mediation process to ‘formulate positions between cultures as a mechanism to develop and express understandings of another culture’ (p. 259). And intercultural mediation involves ‘awareness of one’s own cultural practices and expectations in relation to the aspect of language use being mediated as well as their knowledge of the target culture’ (ibid.). Zhu et al. (2019) propose approaching language learning as a process of translanguaging and cultural translation, whereby learners adapt, appropriate, and transform symbolic values of sense- and meaning-making practices that have evolved in a specific community, and transfer them to another community.

How do language, identity, and culture interact and impact on each other? Within the broad field of intercultural communication, we have seen the prefix ‘inter-’ gradually taking precedence over ‘cross-’, showing a growing consensus among scholars that people of different cultural backgrounds interact with each other. ‘Inter-’ also has an edge over ‘multi-’ as in ‘multicultural’ or ‘multiculturalism’. A focus on interculturality has the potential of going beyond the mere ‘tolerance of difference’ and ‘peaceful co-existence’ of cultural groups and communities implied by the notion of multiculturality (Kim 2009). Within applied linguistics, interculturality through interaction emerged as a line of inquiry with the growing recognition among applied linguists that cultural differences should not be taken as a priori nor as static conditions. It embraces a constructivist paradigm and focuses on joint social activities and their impact on how meaning and social identities are constructed and how participants make aspects of their identities – in particular, ‘cultural identities’ – relevant or irrelevant in interactions through the use of various interactional resources. Methodologically, it relies on conversation analysis/ethnomethodology and interactional sociolinguistics and examines interactional practices and sequences of talk to understand what participants do with cultural memberships; what identities they orient to, align with or resist; and how they ascribe identities to others (for a review, see Zhu 2019 [2014]). The possibility that one can make cultural identity irrelevant to interactions is demonstrated in Nishizaka’s seminal work (1995), in which she analyzes how a journalist oriented to his interactional role as an interviewer and his professional identity rather than his Japaneseness in a radio interview. Further examples of the interactive constitution of interculturality can be found in Mori (2003), Brownlie (2018) and in two special issues of Pragmatics (Higgins 2007) and Language and Intercultural Communication (Young and Sercombe 2010). These studies 85

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explore a variety of contexts and motivations for interculturality in interaction, particularly how ethnicity and nationality can be used as resources by speakers to challenge, maintain or transcend differences. Zhu (2010) also demonstrates how interculturality helps to understand dynamics within groups such as migrant communities which have otherwise been researched homogeneously. Recently, there has been some discussion about adopting the ‘trans’ prefix as in ‘transculturality’ to emphasize the fluidity of cultural identification and communication practices and to capture a sense of moving through and across, rather than in-between, cultural and linguistic boundaries (Baker and Sangiamchit 2019: 473; Abu-Er-Rub et al. 2019). Baker (2022) explains that compared with the inter-metaphor, the trans-metaphor has the added benefit of transgressing and transcending linguistic and cultural borders and avoiding methodological nationalism ‘that implicitly or explicitly accepts nations as given entities, in, between, or towards which culture is said to have developed’ (Abu-Er-Rub et al. 2019: xxvii). Evidently, the idea of transculturality draws inspiration from the ‘translanguaging turn’ (Li, this volume) in applied linguistic and sociolinguistic research, which emphasizes multilingual language users’ capacity to create an apparently seamless flow between languages and language varieties and to transcend the boundaries between named languages and/or language varieties, as well as the boundaries between language and other semiotic systems. In a wider context, both interculturality through interaction and transculturality carry the trademarks of post-modern, performative, and interdiscursive approaches to identity and language which have been inspired by the mobility turn (Sheller and Urry 2006) in the social sciences. Research from migration studies, sociolinguistics, and applied linguistics has highlighted the unprecedented complexity, multiplicity, and inherent contradictions associated with ‘identities in mobility’ and provided new insights into the questions of whether or to what extent ‘fixed’ identities such as ‘ethnicity’ can be transported, imposed, assumed, or negotiated in the context of increasing connectivities and superdiversity in every corner of the world (Zhu 2017). The emphasis of such work is on the agency mobile individuals exercise in negotiating identities, whether they be transnational workers, international students, or displaced refugees. Cultural differences are not just negotiable. They constitute interactional resources that people draw upon in ‘doing’ identities, when they reference certain cultural practices, claim cultural expertise, or invoke cultural differences through indexicality.

How can intercultural communication research contribute to equality and social justice agendas? For a long time, ‘misunderstanding’ has been used as a diagnostic label in the IC literature for what goes wrong in intercultural interactions. The term, however, rests on a romanticized notion of IC – in which problems in IC are someone’s failure to understand what is said and can be made good if people make an effort. The reality is that parties involved in IC are rarely in an equal power relationship. As Piller (2017: 172) points out, without studying inequality and asking the question ‘What makes culture relevant to whom in which context for which purposes?’ culture is ‘nothing more than a convenient and lazy explanation’. Intercultural encounters are contact zones where ‘cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today’ (Pratt 1991: 34). Zhu (2019) identified three practices which carry the trademarks of inequality but are rarely talked about in the existing literature. These include the penalty for being different from norms of dominant groups; the burden of adaptation – who is expected to accommodate whom when 86

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there are differences in cultural practices and who has the authority to make decisions on such matters; and an (in)visible pecking order of cultures or cultural values which may have been internalized by members of subordinate groups. Deepa Oommen (2016), who was born and educated in India and now works in an American university, talks about how growing up in post-colonial India has resulted in her internalized sense of inferiority: ‘I had unconsciously accepted whiteness as symbol of superiority, power and dominance, and when I came to the United States, it assumed significance in my brown body, marking it as the other when contrasted with white bodies’ (p. 80). Further examples of how power structure and agency are navigated by interpreters or migrants can be found in Cho (2021) and Canagarajah (2013). Kramsch (2016) attributes the problems in intercultural encounters to symbolic power, borrowing the term from Bourdieu (1991). For Kramsch (2016), symbolic power is not something that some people have and others do not, nor about one group dominating another. Rather, it is about how power becomes legitimate and recognized by those who are subjected to it and how this kind of domination is embedded in our everyday practices through symbolic systems and forms. Zhu and Kramsch (2016) demonstrate various forms that symbolic power can take in intercultural conversations that result in inequality and, in particular, how a conversation is characterized by the complicity in which power is both allocated and exercised, imposed upon and subjected to. For example, when a participant positions themselves as a non-native speaker by saying ‘My English is not very good,’ they grant the native speaker a profit of distinction whereby the native speaker feels entitled to correct the non-native speaker’s grammar or obliged to compliment the non-native speaker on their English – ‘No, your English is not bad at all.’

What are the perks and perils of intercultural encounters mediated through digital technology? The themes in technology-mediated IC studies identified by Macfadyen et al. (2004) are still relevant today, if not made more prominent during the COVID-19 pandemic. The following summary combines their review and some recent literature. Culture of the Internet. What are the nature and culture(s) of the Internet? Is the Internet the locus of corporate control or a new social space? Is the Internet a site of creation of an entirely new culture or an extension of existing hierarchies of social and economic inequality? Do subcultures exist within the Internet? Why are some groups marginalized on the Internet and how? What contributes to digital divide? How can we harness digital technology to fight misinformation and fake news? Language of the Internet. What are the defining features of the language of the Internet? Do we need new analytical frameworks to examine online language and literacy practices? Is the language of the Internet best described as digital text, a semiotic system, discourse, a communicative tool, or multimodal communication (Schröder et al. 2023)? Do we need new literacy skills, new forms of thinking, or digital language in order to communicate effectively online? How does the Internet facilitate the emergence of global English and translingual practices (Li and Lee 2021), and language play and subversion (Li and Zhu 2019)? Online intercultural communication. In what way does online IC differ from in person IC? At the time of their review, Macfadyen et al. (2004) were concerned that the existing available IC studies tended to borrow ready-made cultural models to explore online IC. Since then, a few studies have emerged. These studies have probed the differences between online and offline communication along the dimension of what is real/true versus virtual/shallow, the control over social interactions via technologies, the degree of engagement, individual difference in motivations, expectation, communicative norms, pedagogy of ICC development, 87

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interpreting/relating skills, and the degree of investment in each other (e.g. Kern and Devolotte 2018; Lawrence 2013). Digital identity and community. How do individuals construct digital identity, online personae or virtual ethnicity? Does technology limit or facilitate virtual identity and virtual community? How does the deterritorialized nature of a virtual community impact the way that community is constructed? Examples of how social media and networked communities break down cultural borders and create new (and compromised) individual and ethnic identities during health crises can be found in Ngwainmbi (2022). Digital intercultural education. What opportunities and challenges do digital technology bring to intercultural education? Are the Internet and communication technologies changing cultures of teaching and learning, for example, creating opportunities for collaborative learning and membership of a dynamic, international, global community? How does differential access to online learning opportunities disadvantage learners from particular groups and how can we use the Internet to enable equal access to education? How can we counterbalance Western dominance of online education and challenge the unquestioned implementation of Western pedagogies in international distance education programme design? Online intercultural exchange has been implemented in foreign language education since the 1990s (O’Dowd 2016) and within the context of a protracted crisis and forced immobility, such as a conflict zone (Imperiale 2021) and the COVID-19 pandemic (Liu and Shirley 2021). The impact of the Internet on culture. How is online IC driving social, political, and cultural changes? Do technologies serve as agents of globalization and cultural homogenization? How can the Internet enhance local cultural values and communicative preferences through its global connectivity? Does online communication represent opportunities or threats to human cultures?

Main methodological concerns There have been plenty of warnings against ethnocentrism and essentialism in IC in the literature. The former is commonly understood as the tendency to evaluate other cultures from the perspective of one’s own culture and the latter as the categorization of people according to essentialist qualities through the assumption that people’s attitudes, beliefs, and behaviours are reflective and indicative of the norms of the culture they belong to. These two concerns also apply to researching IC. For example, Sarangi (1994) critiques the practice of analytic stereotyping, whereby analysts start with prior categorizations of participants as members of particular cultural groups and then resort to a principle of cultural differences in accounting for instances of miscommunication. Other examples of conceptual and methodological concerns include methodological nationalism, a practice of approaching nation/state/society as a sole and/or homogeneous unit of analysis (Wimmer and Schiller 2002). Piller (2017: 68) argues that a nation-based approach to IC is instantiation of banal nationalism that promotes national ways of seeing the world and ‘stereotypes about essentialist and homogeneous national identity’. Reification is another issue of concern. If a study starts with people from different cultural groups, is it at risk of circularity or reification? This problem is well articulated by Scollon et al. (2012: 4): How does a researcher isolate a situation to study as ‘intercultural communication’ in the first place? If you start by picking a conversation between an ‘American’ and a ‘Chinese’, you have started by presupposing that ‘Americans’ and ‘Chinese’ will be different from each other, that this difference will be significant, and that this difference is the most important and defining aspect of that social situation. 88

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There is a new form of essentialism, termed as neo-essentialism (Holliday 2011; Cole and Meadows 2013). It describes the tension in attempts to go beyond national cultures in IC scholarship on the one hand and, on the other hand, falling back on the traditional, essentialist use of national culture as the basic unit. To move away from the Eurocentric tendency in researching IC, Pörner (2014) warns us against cultural exceptionalism among Asia-centric scholars, who, notwithstanding their good intentions, limit one’s analysis to the essence of a non-Western or Indigenous culture, in their movement towards de-Westernization and Indigenization. By searching for essence of a culture, however, they reproduce ethnocentrism, the very problem they set out to challenge.

Recommendations for practice The broader research agendas and scopes in the current IC research agendas have practical implications on the way we do research. A special issue edited by Ladegaard and Phipps (2020) calls for a translational approach to researching IC that foregrounds research as social action. Seeing research as social action requires us to integrate IC research agendas with current social and political issues, to embed impact in our research as opposed to seeing research and impact as a two-stage endeavour, and to acknowledge the existence of values of researchers and participants – for example, what motivates us to choose the topic, what we would like to achieve beyond addressing research questions, and how these values influence the way we interact with participants and analyze and interpret the data (Zhu 2020; Holmes et al. 2022). In addition, we need to revisit the relationship between researcher and participants. The conventional research approach whereby participants appear as suppliers of data, or data itself, does not work anymore if we see research as social action. Participants are partners and coagents of change. Neither are they powerless nor simply waiting there to be empowered. We need to go about research as a process of connections and conversations. But how do we transform the de facto positionality between the researcher and the researched and implement the fundamental conceptual change in ways of working with participants? These are questions that need further probing.

Future directions The developments in the key concepts underpinning IC research and repositioning of goals of IC research has spurred IC research to an increasingly critical and socially engaged direction, in particular, in the following areas of conceptual debates:

Culture What does (critical) interculturality mean? How does it help us understand society, group relation, and identity? Are we ready for transculturality? How does globalization and, more recently, growing nationalism and tribalism impact on cultural fluidity and boundary transgressing?

Communication Is (intercultural) communication neutral? Halualani et al. (2009) have argued that ‘the notion of communication as an ideologically uncontaminated space allowing for the free play and exchange of ideas between self-governing, rational agents willfully expressing themselves in a 89

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wide-open arena of neutral dialogue and communication’ needs to be challenged. What is lost, gained, or transformed in the process of (intercultural) communication?

Language What implications does the notion of translanguaging, a new way of understanding language and communication and transcending artificial and ideological boundaries (see Li, this volume), have in furthering our understanding of IC? The ‘trans’ in ‘translanguaging’ challenges the lingual bias in IC research and brings attention to the full range of semiotic resources for intercultural encounters in which gesture, gaze, body movements, touch, taste, smell, colour, materiality, and so on matter in the same way as linguistic codes. It also challenges the deficit/ difference model still prevalent in IC research and focuses on the agency of individuals in creating, deploying, and interpreting signs for communication. And finally, expanding scope of socially engaged inquiry. How can intercultural research contribute to our understanding of pressing social issues and global challenges such as inequality, health crises, sustainability, the climate crisis, data-empowered societies, and conflict around the world? Kulich et al. (2021) appeal to us to re-examine intercultural research in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic and Zhu et al. (2022) argue to refocus attention on acts of distinction – that is, how boundaries between groups are drawn and dominance plays out in everyday life.

Related topics language and culture; translanguaging; language and race; language socialization

Further reading MacDonald, M. (ed.) (2022) ‘Twentieth anniversary special issue: Issues, controversies and difficult questions’, Special issue of Language and Intercultural Communication, 22(3): 253–411. (A collection of papers that explore the development and trends within language and intercultural communication research in response to four global crises: the COVID-19 pandemic, the migration crisis, conflicts, and the digital divide. It also includes some papers on intercultural creative practices.) Piller, I. (2017) Intercultural Communication: A Critical Introduction, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. (This monograph provides a sociolinguistic perspective to the field of critical intercultural communication.) Zhu, H. (2019) Exploring Intercultural Communication, London: Routledge. (This monograph investigates the role of language in intercultural communication. It uses a ‘back to front’ approach, starting with an examination of intercultural issues in everyday life, followed by a close examination of factors and skills that lead to successful intercultural communication. It concludes with a discussion of influential theories and methodological considerations.) Zhu, H. and Kramsch, C. (eds.) (2016) ‘Symbolic power and conversational inequality in intercultural communication’, Special issue of Applied Linguistics Review, 7(4): 375–529. (This is a collection of papers that investigate how symbolic power is defined and constituted in intercultural communication and how power inequality impacts the way language is used.)

References Abu-Er-Rub, L., Brosius, C., Meurer, S., Panagiotopoulos, D. and Richter, S. (eds.) (2019) Engaging Transculturality: Concepts, Key Terms, Case studies, London: Routledge. Adichie, C. N. (2009) ‘The danger of a single story’, TED Talk. www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_ adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story?language=en 90

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Allport, G. W. (1954) The Nature of Prejudice, Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books. Baker, W. (2022) ‘From intercultural to transcultural communication’, Language and Intercultural Communication, 22(3): 280–293. DOI: 10.1080/14708477.2021.2001477 Baker, W. and Sangiamchit, C. (2019) ‘Transcultural communication: Language, communication and culture through English as a lingua franca in a social network community’, Language and Intercultural Communication, 19(6): 471–487. https://doi.org/10.1080/14708477.2019.1606230 Benedict, R. (1946) The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture, Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Blum-Kulka, S. and Olshtain, E. (1984) ‘Requests and apologies: A cross-cultural study of speech act realisation patterns’, Applied Linguistics, 5(3): 196–213. Bourdieu, P. (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Harvard College and Routledge and Kegan Paul (English translation by R. Nice). Originally published in 1979 as La distinction: critique sociale du jugement, Paris: Minuit. Bourdieu, P. (1991) Language and Symbolic Power (edited and Introduced by John B. Thompson and English translation by G. Raymond and M. Adamson), Cambridge: Polity Press. Brownlie, S. (2018) ‘Using cultural categories for opposition and brokering in conflict mediation’, Language and Intercultural Communication, 18(1): 90–106. DOI: 10.1080/14708477.2017.1400506 Byram, M. (1989) Cultural Studies in Foreign Language Education, Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Byram, M. (1997) Teaching and Assessing Intercultural Communicative Competence, Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Canagarajah, S. (2013) ‘Agency and power in intercultural communication: Negotiating English in translocal spaces’, Language and Intercultural Communication, 13(2): 202–224. Cho, J. (2021) Intercultural Communication in Interpreting: Power and Choices, London: Routledge. Cole, D. and Meadows, B. (2013) ‘Avoiding the essentialist trap in intercultural education’, in F. Dervin and A. J. Liddicoat (eds.), Linguistics for Intercultural Education, Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins, pp. 30–47. Davis-DuBois, R. (1946) ‘The face-to-face group as a unit for a program of intercultural educations’, The Journal of Educational Sociology, 19(9): 555–561. DuBois, W. E. B. (1903) The souls of black folk, 3rd ed., Chicago, IL: A. C. McClure and Co. Feng, A., Byram, M. and Fleming, M. (2009) Becoming Interculturally Competent through Education and Training, Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Goddard, C. and Wierzbicka, A. (2004) ‘Cultural scripts: What are they and what are they good for?’, Intercultural Pragmatics, 1(2): 153–166. Gumperz, J. J. (1978) ‘The conversational analysis of interethnic communication’, in E. Ross (ed.), Interethnic Communication, Athens: University of Georgia Press, pp. 13–31. Gumperz, J. J. (1982) Discourse Strategies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hall, E. T. (1959) The Silent Language, Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co. Halualani, R. T., Mendoza, S. L. and Drzewiecka, J. A. (2009) ‘“Critical” junctures in intercultural communication studies: A review’, Review of Communication, 9(1): 17–35. DOI: 10.1080/15358590802169504 Higgins, C. (ed.) (2007) ‘A closer look at cultural differences: “Interculturality” in talk-in-interaction’, Special Issue of Pragmatics, 17. Holliday, A. (2011) Intercultural Communication and Ideology, London: Sage. Holmes, P., Reynolds, J. and Ganassin, S. (2022) ‘Afterword’, in P. Holmes, J. Reynolds and S. Ganassin (eds.), The Politics of Researching Multilingually, Bristol: Multilingual Matters, pp. 345–352. Imperiale, M. G. (2021) ‘Intercultural education in times of restricted travel: Lessons from the Gaza strip’, Intercultural Communication Education, 4(1): 22–38. Kaplan, R. B. (1966) ‘Cultural thought patterns in intercultural education’, Language Learning, 16: 1–20. Kern, R. and Devolotte, C. (2018) Screens and Scenes: Multimodal Communication in Online Intercultural Encounters, London: Routledge. Kim, T. (2009) ‘Transnational academic mobility, internationalization and interculturality in higher education’, Intercultural Education, 20(5): 395–405. Kramsch, C. (1998) Language and Culture, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kramsch, C. (2009) ‘Third culture and language education’, in W. Li and V. Cook (eds.), Contemporary Applied Linguistics. Volume 1: Language Teaching and Learning, London: Continuum, pp. 233–254. Kramsch, C. (2016) ‘“The multiple faces of symbolic power”, in H. Zhu and C. Kramsch (eds.), Symbolic Power and Conversational Inequality in Intercultural Communication’, A special issue of Applied Linguistics Review, 7(4): 517–529. 91

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Kulich, S. J., Komisarof, A., Smith, L. R., and Cushner, K. (2021) ‘Re-examining intercultural research and relations in the COVID pandemic’, International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 80: A1–A6. Kulich, S. J., Weng, L., Tong, R. and DuBois, G. (2020) ‘Interdisciplinary history of intercultural communication studies’, in D. Landis and D. P. S. Bhawuk (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Intercultural Training, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 60–163. Kramsch, C. and Whiteside, A. (2008) ‘Language ecology in multilingual settings: Towards a theory of symbolic competence’, Applied Linguistics, 29(4): 645–671. Ladegaard, H. J. and Phipps, A. (2020) ‘Intercultural research and social activism’, Language and Intercultural Communication, 20(2): 67–80. DOI: 10.1080/14708477.2020.1729786 Lado, R. (1957) Linguistics across Cultures: Applied Linguistics for Language Teachers, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Lawrence, G. (2013) ‘A working model for intercultural learning and engagement in collaborative online language learning environments’, Intercultural Education, 24(4): 303–314. Leeds‐Hurwitz,  W.  (1990)  ‘Notes  in  the  history  of  intercultural  communication:  The  Foreign  Service  Institute and the mandate for intercultural training’, Quarterly Journal of Speech, 76(3): 262–281. DOI: 10.1080/00335639009383919 Li, W. and Lee, T. K. (2021) ‘Language play in and with Chinese: Traditional genres and contemporary developments’, Global Chinese, 7(2): 125–142. DOI: 10.1515/glochi-2021-2008 Li, W. and Zhu, H. (2019) ‘Tranßcripting: Playful subversion with Chinese characters’, International Journal of Multilingualism, 16(2): 145–161. Liddicoat, A. J. (2014) ‘Pragmatics and intercultural mediation in intercultural language learning’, Intercultural Pragmatics, 11(2): 259–277. Liu, Y. and Shirley, T. (2021) ‘Without crossing a border: Exploring the impact of shifting study abroad online on students’ learning and intercultural competence development during the COVID-19 pandemic’, Online Learning, 25(1): 182–194. https://doi.org/10.24059/olj.v25i1.2471 Macfadyen, L. P., Roche, J. and Doff, S. (2004) Communicating across Cultures in Cyberspace: A Bibliographical Review of Intercultural Communication Online, Münster, Germany: LIT Verlag. Martin, J. N., Nakayama, T. K. and Carbaugh, D. (2020) ‘A global look at the history and development of language and Intercultural Communication’, in J. Jackson (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Language and Intercultural Communication, 2nd ed., London: Routledge, pp. 19–38. Mead, M. (1928) Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilisation, New York: William Morrow. Mori, J. (2003) ‘The construction of interculturality: A study of initial encounters between Japanese and American students’, Research on Language and Social Interaction, 36(2): 143–184. https://doi. org/10.1207/S15327973RLSI3602_3 Nakayama, T. K. and Halualani, R. T. (eds.) (2010) The Handbook of Critical Intercultural Communication, Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Ngwainmbi, E. K. (ed.) (2022) Dismantling Cultural Borders through Social Media and Digital Communications: How Networked Communities Compromise Identity, Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave. Nishizaka, A. (1995) ‘The interactive constitution of interculturality: How to be a Japanese with words’, Human Studies, 18(2): 301–326. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01323214 O’Dowd, R. (2016) ‘Emerging trends and new directions in telecollaborative learning’, CALICO Journal, 33(3): 291–310. Oommen, D. (2016) ‘Difference, disconnection, social support, and connection: Communication with the host environment and cultural adaptation’, in A. Komisarof and H. Zhu (eds.), Crossing Boundaries and Weaving Intercultural Work, Life and Scholarship in Globalizing Universities, London: Routledge, pp. 78–88. Piller, I. (2017) Intercultural Communication: A Critical Introduction, 2nd ed., Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Pörner, M. (2014) ‘Intercultural communication studies and the problem of Chinese Exceptionalism’, in S. Poutiainen (ed.), Theoretical Turbulence in Intercultural Communication Studies, Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 121–136. Pratt, M. L. (1991) ‘Arts of the contact zone: A keynote speech’, Profession, 33–40. www.jstor.org/ stable/25595469 Sarangi, S. (1994) ‘Intercultural or not? Beyond celebration of cultural differences in miscommunication analysis’, Pragmatics, 4(3): 409–427. https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.4.3.05sar Schröder, U., Adami, E. and Dailey-O’Cain, J. (2023) Multimodal Communication in Intercultural Interaction, London: Routledge. 92

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8 Institutional discourse Zsófia Demjén and Miguel Pérez-Milans

Introduction In this chapter, we reflect on different perspectives on and approaches to applied linguistics research in and around institutions. We do this as two members of a research and teaching centre for applied linguistics in the UK who have both worked with institutional discourse in our research and teaching. Though we have done so in different ways, we purposefully use our common ground to question dichotomies that are sometimes assumed to exist in the study of institutional discourse, such as the supposed divide between text-based, descriptive, and critical approaches. Privileging this way of describing institutional discourse inevitably means that we have limited space to devote to typical, chronological overviews that one might expect in a handbook chapter on the subject. For readers looking for these, we recommend excellent existing summaries of research on institutional discourse, including Sarangi and Roberts (1999), Mayr (2015) and indeed Roberts (2011) in the first edition of this Handbook. As both of us are involved in MA programmes that draw on the concept of institutional discourse, we have joined forces for this chapter with the aim of helping readers navigate this complex, often contested, and kaleidoscopic object of study. We show how institutional discourse can be approached in a variety of ways, each with implications for how researchers think about discourse and institutions, as well as for ways in which they ask questions, generate, and make sense of data. For some sections of the chapter, we separate our two voices and disambiguate who is speaking, Zsófia or Miguel. This makes sense in particular where we describe projects that only one of us is involved in. In other sections, however, we write as a unified voice to provide holistic reflections. In this way, we develop and hope to model a way in which collaboration and cooperation between supposedly different viewpoints can lead to deeper understandings of situations, questions, and issues in everyday life (cf. Simpson 2011). In the following sections, we outline different views of institutional discourse, why it is significant, what aspects have received particular attention, and what current and future topics of importance might be within applied linguistics. We also present two examples from our own recent research to demonstrate two different but complementary ways in which institutional discourse might be studied. 94

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Historical perspectives Defining institutions and institutional discourse An institution is often defined as a large entity, similar to an organization but not necessarily commercial in nature, with various professions located within it, both physically and metaphorically (Sarangi and Roberts 1999). University College London (UCL), where we are located, is one example of such an institution. It encompasses, and in some cases houses, multiple professions, and professionals – administrators, accountants, professors, teaching assistants, researchers, technicians, cleaners, counsellors, managers, and security guards, to name a few, all at varying levels of different professional hierarchies – carrying out a wide range of interlinked activities. What unites (or should unite) these professions and professionals are shared habitual practices (Roberts 2009: 181) – ‘how we do things around here’. These include stable and enduring features of talk and text assembled through particular activities in social settings (often specific to small teams, departments, or entire domains of institutions) which bring with them their own histories and traditions – that is, ‘the institutional order’ (Mayr 2008; see also Smith 2005). Professions do not need to be united by being co-located in a particular space or building. Existing research in the field has mostly focused on governmental and non-governmental organizations and settings, such as healthcare (e.g. Moyer 2011), social work (e.g. Hall et al. 2006), legal practice (e.g. Angermeyer 2009), bureaucracies (e.g. Sarangi and Slembrouck 1996), citizen and immigration services (e.g. Codó 2008), or education (e.g. Martín Rojo 2010). In these types of institutions, it is recognized that activities, relations, and economic outcomes are shaped by ideas, values, and assumptions of ‘good’ language, culture, identity, nationhood, and citizenship that have consolidated worldwide since the advent of modern nationalism in the 19th century (Bauman and Briggs 2003). And discourse has been central to explorations of these institutions, ‘both as a locus of analysis of the transformation of practice in such settings and as the means through which institutions narrate and legitimize the changes they undergo’ (Codó and Pérez-Milans 2014: 1). In other words, discourse is one of the principal means by which institutions create a coherent social reality that frames their sense of who they are (Mumby and Clair 1997) and how they do things. In this chapter, we understand discourse as ‘a general mode of semiosis, i.e. meaningful semiotic behaviour’ comprising ‘all forms of meaningful semiotic human activity seen in connection with social, cultural, and historical patterns and developments of use’ (Blommaert 2005: 2–3). At the same time, we recognize that, although it is (often) impossible and potentially counterproductive (cf. Heller 2001) to maintain a distinction between macro societal, micro textual, and sometimes meso levels of analysis, most research will privilege certain aspects of discourse, often for practical reasons. Readers will see this difference in emphasis in the two examples of current research that we present further here. We hope this will illustrate clearly that there are many ways of studying institutional discourse. We should also note that discourse is not by definition institutional. But it becomes so when ‘participants engage in and accomplish institutionally relevant activities . . . and in doing so, orient to the relevance of their institutional identities for the interaction’ (Drew and Sorjonen 2011: 193). One example that many of our readers will be familiar with is student assignment marking. This is a process where institutional categories (i.e. grades) are applied to pieces of work based on institutional criteria (i.e. marking criteria) by one or more professionals (i.e. tutors/markers) to evaluate work produced by professionals in training (i.e. students). Although there may be disagreement between professionals when it comes to this evaluation, discussion 95

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tends to be (or should be, from the institution’s perspective) conducted in terms of the criteria themselves. Both the professionals and professionals-to-be generally accept that this is how student work is evaluated, thereby reinforcing institutional realities.

Typical themes of research on institutional discourse Traditionally, research on institutional discourse has tended to examine how organizations work, how ‘lay’ people and experts interact and how knowledge and power get constructed and circulate within routines, systems, and common-sense practices of work-related settings. One main focus for investigations of institutional discourse has been (often unspoken) rules governing language, communication, and discourse (cf. Foucault 1981) which contribute to regulating who is or is not there, is or is not referred to or called upon, speaks or not, what can/cannot be said, and how things need to be said and categorized. This ‘order’ has implications for how professions are constructed and enacted, how power dynamics work, and how social inequality is produced and naturalized at large. A focus on language allows us to show that the degree of regulation and control being exerted is often implicit rather than explicitly coercive. An early study by Deetz and Mumby (1985), for example, found that war metaphors used to describe the activities of an organization can establish a framework of action and interpretation, a way of looking at things, that makes certain executive decisions appear legitimate or ‘normal’, because they make sense within a frame, or mindset, of battle. Recent experimental studies have confirmed that metaphors influence reasoning in this way because they subtly foreground some aspects of a topic or situation while backgrounding others (e.g. Thibodeau and Boroditsky 2011). Another important theme has been the interactional processes and rules of specific activities, such as service encounters, doctor-patient consultations, or police interviews. Here, the attention has often been on ‘professionals’ themselves, with the aim of mapping the accomplishment of goal-oriented activities (such as buying-selling or breaking bad news) within specific institutions. Nowhere are institutional constraints on goal-oriented activities more explicit than in legal contexts, such as courtroom interactions (Atkinson and Drew 1979) and police interrogations (Heydon 2005). Heydon (2005), for instance, showed that during police interviews, officers (i.e. institutional representatives) use (re)formulations to summarize the gist of what has been said by suspects to construct narratives with some details highlighted and others missed out. This allows them to get closer to an institutionally ‘preferred version’ of events, within the legal constraint of having to record a suspect’s version of events. Although this kind of research does not necessarily set out to investigate inequality, in practice, interpretations do often centre around this issue. In investigating job interviews as gatekeeping encounters, for example, Gumperz (1992) and later Campbell and Roberts (2007) surfaced the specific knowledge assumptions and expectations for how responses to interview questions should be formulated that underpin decision-making in the hiring process – and thus what the socioeconomic consequences may be when different groups have unequal access to the required assumptions and expectations. This demonstrates that while various approaches to institutional discourse may start from different positions and focus on different aspects of the object of study, there is also considerable overlap in what ends up being said about institutions. As Roberts (2011: 84) summarized, ‘Institutional discourse cannot be uncoupled from powerful discourse.’

Critical issues and topics In the last few decades, the field has progressively moved from a focus on themes presented here to broader perspectives on how institutions and institutional discourse might affect everyday 96

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lives and realities and how they get embedded in broader structural inequalities (Cameron 2000). This can be seen in analyses of institutions as ‘sites of struggle’ (e.g. Mumby and Clair 1997; Sarangi and Roberts 1999; Heller 1999), which captures the idea that meaning-making practices, social/moral categories (about practices and participants), and other forms of knowledge (re)produced, circulated, and attributed value in institutional settings 1 2

are always tied to wider political configurations and socioeconomic interests of those who have sought to establish them and constitute a discursive terrain in which different social groups fight over (re)defining and controlling what counts as legitimate knowledge and participation.

Critical ethnographic and sociolinguistic research of educational institutions, for instance, has documented how daily discursive (re)production of what counts as a ‘good student’, legitimate knowledge or appropriate participation in a given context can hardly be detached from ways in which class-based and racial hierarchies are reinstated vis-à-vis long-standing histories of capitalism/colonialism (e.g. Lin and Martin 2005). Given the importance of institutions as sites of struggle within the study of institutional discourse, regardless of perspective, we centre our current research contributions in the next section around this issue.

Current contributions and research Our approaches in this chapter draw on the shared assumption that daily communicative activities are a key window onto the study of how institutionally arranged social relations, categories, and knowledge are (re)made under specific socioeconomic and political conditions. Although we focus on different institutional settings and take different types of communicative ‘texts’ as the entry point, we share an interest in exploring struggles over who gets to define what counts as valuable ways of knowing and doing and what the consequences might be for those concerned.

Zsófia – what is a ‘good’ death? I, Zsófia, experienced institutions as potential sites of struggle in the context of a collaborative, ESRC-funded research project (ES/J007927/1, PI Elena Semino) investigating what metaphors and narratives reveal about palliative care professionals’ views of ‘good’ versus ‘bad’ deaths (Demjén et al. 2016; Semino et al. 2014, 2018). My work tends to focus very much on (verbal) language and (verbal) texts themselves, and the institutional nature of this language, or indeed the institution itself, is rarely in focus. This is because my interest is in understanding people’s lived experience (whether as patients, professionals, or other types of participants) of illness, health, and healthcare through language they use to describe this. Nevertheless, since healthcare is one of the prototypical institutions that has been the object of study in applied linguistics (Sarangi and Roberts 1999), institutions and institutionalization do come into play. They are either made relevant by people themselves, or the concepts are needed for making sense of data. The study I describe here is of the second type. As part of the multidisciplinary Metaphor in End-of-life Care project (http://wp.lancs.ac.uk/ melc/), the team, including me, interviewed 13 healthcare professionals working in leadership positions in hospice and palliative care in the UK. We explored constructions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ deaths in these interviews, focusing specifically on metaphors and narratives that participants produced during the interviews. We noticed striking similarities across healthcare 97

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professionals regardless of setting and geographical location within the UK, especially in constructions of good deaths. While interviewees always pointed out that a good death is a matter of perspective and explicitly recognized that most people wish to die at home, without professional intervention, they also constructed good deaths using a limited number of recurring metaphors, such as being ‘at peace/peaceful’, being ‘symptom-/pain-free’, having ‘open’ conversations with family members, and accepting death as the ‘end’ of one’s ‘journey’. Excerpt 1 For me I suppose it’s a good death . . . it’s about peacefulness you know and having peace being peaceful being comfortable you know being at peace with yourself but also with the your surroundings erm being as comfortable and pain free, I think pain free is to the a the crucial element to it Excerpt 2 She was able to accept that it was the end so I think that’s what you would call a good death. Excerpt 3 So it’s having those kinds of open discussions with them to try and erm give them the options. The narratives describing examples of good deaths also showed remarkable consistency across our interviewees. They invariably began at a point when a lot had already happened to patients – they had received a terminal diagnosis and their health had deteriorated substantially – and focused on a current difficult situation with potential to result in a ‘bad’ death (rather than the diagnosis or deterioration). The core of the narrative was then about how this situation was addressed by professional interventions in hospice, and changed to such an extent that the patient had a good death. Excerpt 4 is a good example of this: Excerpt 4 Erm I think of another gentleman who came to the hospice, he was a Portuguese speaker, had pretty much no English at all. And he’d had recurrent hiccoughs for about five months. And the medical team put in a referral for him to have some acupuncture. And looking at his case history, he was getting so depressed not just with the hiccoughs but with his diagnosis of stomach cancer. And he’d been suicidal at one stage, he was so depressed that he couldn’t enjoy his wife’s cooking. He was in one of the wards and was desperate to get better to go home. And we went to see him as a team and did some acupuncture, and the recurrent hiccoughs erm reduced considerably, in the first instance and then and then stopped and he was able to go home. And so I think that was a good piece of collective collaborative work. To actually fulfil the wishes of you know he wanted to get home spend a bit of time and be able enjoy his wife’s cooking. Erm he died a few months later, but I think that was an illustration of you know an immediate sort of response to a request that worked quite well. The actions that constitute a successful professional intervention tended to be attributed to a collective agent (e.g. ‘we’, ‘as a team’, ‘collective collaborative work’) and a fairly large 98

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proportion of the stories consisted of reflections and Labovian evaluation (Labov 2013). This is because death is generally considered unwelcome and associated with physical and emotional suffering, so a positive assessment of particular deaths requires substantial and sensitive discursive work. Interviewees tended to evaluate deaths as positive implicitly by focusing explicit evaluation on the hospice team’s intervention (e.g. ‘good piece of . . . work’, ‘worked quite well’) as well as by using past tense or hypothetical references to negative things that were resolved or avoided by that intervention (e.g. ‘was getting so depressed’). In this way, narratives made the case that dying in a hospice is better than dying in hospital or at home without any hospice care and gently countered widely held views – explicitly acknowledged by interviewees – that it is best to die at home. These homogeneous descriptions are in contrast with how patients and unpaid carers conceptualize good and bad deaths. For example, Payne et al. (1996) found that patients’ descriptions were far more heterogeneous, and included ‘dying in one’s sleep, dying quietly, with dignity, being pain free and dying suddenly’ (p. 307). In trying to understand the professional homogeneity, our attention was directed to training that healthcare professionals undergo as they develop in their specialism and ways in which death was conceptualized there. Education, one means by which people become institutionalized, had unsurprisingly left a trace on our participants. Presenting dying at a hospice as the best option with a unified view on benefits of intervention is a particular construction of the story world that, on the one hand, supports the professional identity speakers wish to project (Bamberg and Georgakopoulou 2008) and also suggests the persistence of a ‘medical model’ (see Payne et al. 1996). Zooming further out in search of explanations of our results, we noted that narrative and metaphorical patterns that we identified in individual descriptions were also closely related to patterns associated with so-called ‘medical-revivalist’ discourses of death and dying that had begun to emerge in Western societies in the late 20th century (Carpentier and van Brussel 2012; Walter 1994). Indeed, the healthcare education context that had shaped our participants’ views was itself under influence of broader sociopolitical institutions that value independence, self-mastery, and self-care (Carpentier and van Brussel 2012) – that is, these are tied to a neoliberal rationality whereby individuals are made responsible for tasks previously undertaken by welfare states. The contrast between the heterogeneity of patient constructions of a good death and specific, homogeneous good deaths represented in professional narratives we explored is a good example of how an institution, or discourses within institutions, might become sites of struggle. Different ways of describing, constructing, or framing an issue or a concept can have consequences for how people experience them, how they reason about them, and how they behave in relation to them (cf. Thibodeau and Boroditsky 2011; van Brussel and Carpentier 2012). In this case, it may influence, however inadvertently, options available to the dying. And for us, this became the crucial focus of our discussion. If a good death is consistently framed in terms of a death that happens in a hospice context, involving peacefulness, open conversations, and acceptance, then hospice professionals may end up guiding patients and their families towards this path even if patients might prefer a different approach or if real acceptance is almost impossible to achieve (cf. Scarre 2012). As Walters put it most poignantly, The rhetoric of palliative care sets great store by the autonomy of the individual patient and the fulfilling of the latter’s wishes about how and where (if not when!) she chooses to die. In reality, however, this freedom can sometimes be compromised by the pressure of control towards what professionals consider to be a ‘good death’. (2004: 406) 99

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Of course, institutions and institutional influence are apparent in several ways in this case: the team asked interviewees about their views of different qualities of death precisely because the concept of ‘good death’ is known to play a central role in contemporary discourses on and approaches to death, dying (van Brussel and Carpentier 2012; Cottrell and Duggleby 2016), and palliative care (Smith 2000). In other words, the idea of a good death is central to the activities of hospices and palliative care organizations and this is formalized in policy documents such as the Department of Health’s End of Life Care Strategy for England and Wales (2008), which define exactly what is meant by a good death. The project, and this particular exploration, did not in any way set out to investigate the institutional making of constructions of good and bad deaths. Yet in interpreting and explaining patterns the team found, they could not but look to literature on relevant institutions and ideologies, as language ‘on the ground’ was so closely connected to them. This project may be a more peripheral kind of institutional discourse research, but it nevertheless draws on and contributes to concepts and ideas that are more central to the field.

Miguel – becoming employable, doing ‘good’ speculative architecture My (Miguel’s) research on institutional discourse as a site of struggle has always examined the entanglement of communicative practices, social relations, and wider structures of inequality across different settings in Madrid, mainland China, London, and Hong Kong. In so doing, however, the study of such practices, relations and structures has gradually shaped my approach to (and understanding of) institutional discourse, away from exploring how meanings, practices and subjectivities are produced, enacted, circulated and attributed value in bounded governmental spaces (e.g. schools), towards studying such issues in more complex webs that connect various institutions and actors across transnational spaces (e.g. Pérez-Milans and Guo 2020). This is in line with critical, sociolinguistic, and ethnographic research paying now closer attention to how the interlocking of technologies, institutions, actors, and daily meaning-making practices enables social processes with far-reaching (self)regulatory and material effects (e.g. Lorente 2017; Martín Rojo and Del Percio 2019). The significance of an inquiry of this sort is revealed in research of institutional discourses that are visibly shaped by globalizing forms of market expansion, and in this section, I focus on graduate employability as a relevant point of reference. As universities worldwide are reported to be impacted by internationalization policies, their traditional role in preparing students to become ‘ideal national citizens’ of a nation-state has gradually adjusted to a new framework whereby they appear as global brands aiming to attract students from all over the world and to turn them into employable subjects via provision of developmental skills and knowledge with which to access global labour markets. More specifically, universities have been turned into key nodes within networks of governmental and non-governmental institutions that function in accordance with market principles of supply and demand to secure a constant flow of income from students’ registration while at the same time helping to (re)constitute transnationalized economic niches and labour markets (Beverungen et al. 2009). This was clear in an exploratory research project where my collaborators and I focused on trajectories of international students enrolled in various MA programmes in London. Understanding the ways in which becoming a professional was discursively mediated in our research context involved more than just gathering university curricula or prospectuses. It also required tracking down situated processes of discourse enregisterment (Agha 2007) whereby sets of communicative practices are socially packaged, regrouped, and recognized as emblematic of ‘being professional’ or ‘doing professionalism’ in transnational webs of institutions that linked 100

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up universities, think tanks, private companies, and governmental agencies. One network that I have examined more closely is associated with becoming a speculative architect, since one of our participants was enrolled in a MA programme on urban planning and design. Seen as a professional area of expertise concerned with fantastic, speculative, and imaginary urbanisms that uses fiction, film, and performance as tools to explore implications and consequences of new technologies and ecological conditions, speculative architecture has been described as an attempt to carve a new professional niche. In particular, I focused on a web of institutions and actors involved in setting up international postgraduate programmes on speculative architecture that have contributed to establish it as a clear genre of architecture and career path – that is, these programmes allow MA students in urban planning and design in the UK to improve their employability by pursuing further specialization at research institutes and higher education institutions in other countries. These institutions and actors include Liam Young, theorist of architecture internationally acclaimed in both mainstream and architectural media; Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today, a London-based think tank that produces and exhibits a number of speculative architectural artefacts, such as documentaries and short films worldwide; and the Strelka Institute, a school of architecture and design based in Russia that has been listed among Domus magazine’s top 100 best European architectural schools and whose board of trustees involves members of the Public Council of the Ministry of Culture in Russia and founders of Russian-based development companies, funds, and publishing houses. As founder of Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today and a regular lecturer in training programmes offered at the Strelka Institute, I took Liam Young as entry point in my inquiry, and a connector to institutions and actors within the relevant infrastructure. I tracked down his online activities during a period of ten years, in between 2007 and 2017, leading to a data corpus that includes recordings of various communicative activities across different socio-institutional spaces, such as interviews with (online and more traditional) media, public exhibitions and lectures in museums and research institutions interested in architecture and design, films and other multimodal artefacts produced by and displayed via Young’s think tank, and educational institutions that collaborate with him in other countries. Though such activities are communicatively arranged in different ways according to different aims and participant actors, they all have a key distinguishing interdiscursivity (Silverstein 2005) feature: a salient social persona that is recurrently performed through practice. In other words, doing speculative architecture is performed in my corpus of data by way of enacting the figure of a professional, in this case an architect, who, on the one hand, has a critical stance towards social inequality, and particularly with normalized relationships between humans and technologies that contribute to state surveillance and economic exploitation and, on the other, is devoted to offering or imagining alternative (i.e. liberating) forms of social organization. This figure of personhood is enacted through highly stylized public performances that (1) narrate dystopic futures through the interplay of real and fictional spaces and times and (2) put forward practical propositions for speculative intervention with economic relevance. Extract 5 shows an instance of stylized performance taken from a public lecture delivered by Liam Young at the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles (USA), on 28 October 2015. The lecture was video-recorded and made available on the website of Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today (https://liamyoung.org), captioned as ‘City Everywhere: Kim Kardashian and the Dark Side of the Screen. Multiscreen Storytelling Performance’. The video shows Liam Young standing on the left side of the frame, next to a lectern from which he reads his script throughout the 52-minute lecture. As the event begins, three wide screens to his left show changing images of American television personality Kim Kardashian with her name in the background, and the audience is 101

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seen sitting in darkness, in front of the screens. Seven minutes into the lecture, the activity goes as follows (see transcription conventions in the appendix): Excerpt 5. Extract from City Everywhere 1 so what I wanna explore tonight is / who we become / 2 in this pixelated world // we become / Kimmie / 3 Kimmie is the icon / of our media architectural age / 4 and Kim Kardashian will be our guide today / 5 to help us find the city everywhere / cause Kim is / the future no one wanted // 6 uh / Kim unfortunately is also the- / the future already here // 7 she’s a creature that lives in the network / 8 she’s an animated media system / 9 she’s not just her physical self but to understand Kim / 10 and / also to understand ourselves in the architectures we inhabit // 11 you’ve gotta look / not just at / 12 our physical / and digital space / (. . .) 13 {loud music playing. Images on the central screen show the skyline of a city all made up of 14 residential skyscrapers while the screens to the sides display street images of long ques of 15 people with phenotypical characteristics often stereotyped as “Asian” waiting to enter 16 phone stores as well as of white individuals taking selfies of themselves. Music fades away} 17 with Kim we go to the residential districts / 18 it’s our first stop / in city everywhere (. . .) 19 and we put our ears to the cool bevel aluminium door of the20 the apartment to listen // 21 inside we hear Dury drop a Samsung Galaxy SX phone under the kitchen table (2”) 22 we hear it chime softly as it makes contact with the paper thing Samsung quiz smart power 23 charger ((mat)) // 24 we hear scream down the hallway and her husband raising the voice / 25 over the Samsung air conditioner // 26 why does the new TV say LG on it? / 27 she says/because it’s made by LG / 28 her husband replies / 29 but // our lease is up for review in three months / 30 you trying to get us thrown out? / 31 you bought an LG TV / into a Samsung housing block // 32 what the hell will the neighbours say? (8”) 33 {side screens display images of civilian protests from the air while the central screen shows 34 a ground-based angle to young males covering their faces in front of riot police} 102

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35 so in city everywhere these new relationships to technology suggest / 36 new forms of community // 37 technology breeds new subcultures in city everywhere and allegiance to ba- brands / 38 Samsung or- / Apple / defines who we are much closer to our virtual community / 39 than we are to our neighbours / 40 something like the Egyptian revolution here {points at screen} was a / 41 community formed / through a network // 42 and in a way we’re not / Australian or- / 43 American anymore than / we are / believers // 44 {new images displayed on the screens, now picturing global influencers} (3”) 45 or Cumberbitches or Directioners or Little Monsters / 46 or Beyhives or KatyCats or Kayne Nation or – Kimmey {in soft laughter} / 47 {the image of Kim Kardashian is displayed on the screens} 48 {laughter from the audience} (1”) 49 oh Kimmey / Kimmey yey! 50 {laughter from the audience} (2”) 51 so the greatest force in city everywhere is the / consumption of media / 52 that / is what defines us / unfortunately {laughs} / Kimmie defines us Liam Young combines the syncing of his voice-over flat-tone narration, music, and three separate video feeds to move the narration from the persona of Kim Kardashian (lines 1–12) to the residential districts in ‘city everywhere’ (lines 13–32) to Arab Spring protests in Egypt (lines 33–41) to global influencers (lines 42–52). In so doing, the persona of Kim Kardashian as an archetypal figure of media consumption culture allows Young to construct a narrative that foregrounds dystopian future cities in which real/imaginary physical environments and forms of social citizenship appear as mediated by technologies in ways that contribute to enhancing surveillance (e.g. residents in the Samsung housing block risking eviction buying home products from a different brand). He adopts a critical stance towards such forms of social organization that relies on the digital embodiment of Kim Kardashian in the form of an animated system ‘that lives in the network’. This embodiment places Kardashian at the intersection of past-present-future temporal references and various geographical locations whereby normalized actions that are deemed to be mediated by technological artefacts get linked to unsettling future possibilities which are, in turn, introduced as becoming present realities. Indeed, Kim Kardashian is described both as an ‘outcome of our media architectural age’ and the undesired future that is ‘already here’, a spatio-temporal omnipresence that drives the tour of ‘city everywhere’ by way of juxtaposing 1

2

images of recognizable mundane activities today that are emplaced in global urbanized landscapes invoked via racialized depictions of people participating in them (e.g. long ques of people with phenotypical characteristics often stereotyped as ‘Asian’ waiting to enter phone stores or white individuals taking selfies of themselves) (lines 13–15); constructed dialogues from future scenarios of technological totalitarianism (e.g. residents in a Samsung housing block worried about eviction for buying LG TVs) (lines 26–32); and 103

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3

descriptions of shifting forms of identity whereby depicted past nation-based civil-rights movements (e.g. civil revolts in Egypt) get replaced with ridiculed media-based identifications associated with ‘global influencers’ who are labelled as ‘Cumberbitches’, ‘Directioners’, or ‘Kayne Nation’ (see also laughter from both Young and the audience in lines 46–52).

The educational institutions involved in training (and certifying) speculative architects within the focal infrastructural web, such as the Strelka Institute, also play an important part in the institutionalization of this enacted professional persona through scripting (i.e. standardizing) meaning-making practices concerned with item 2 – that is, the design of practical propositions for speculative intervention with economic relevance. Aimed to grow a pool of skilled professionals who can participate in governmental and non-governmental employability projects serving major infrastructural developments in Russia and beyond, this organization offers two English-medium postgraduate programmes. These programmes include an MA in advanced urban design and a five-month programme called the New Normal, both of which explicitly aim to introduce students to the contemporary European and American design theory and practices, while at the same time offering operational toolkits for application of this knowledge in the new markets. It helps to understand the specificity of research and design work in highly volatile conditions of the cities in Russia, South Africa and [China], providing competencies beyond traditional urbanism. The programme offers unique expertise in doing projects and research in developing countries and economies in transition – places where most urbanization and suburbanization is happening nowadays. (https://strelkamag.com/en?tags=advancedurbandesign) These two programmes involve high-stakes regulated practices where students’ learning is packaged as a final output that is deemed to receive the scrutiny of a panel of experts and the public in general. They conclude every year with a public presentation of students’ projects, all of them presented by their authors in multimodal performances similar to those by Liam Young as shown in Extract 5. Such projects, accessible on Strelka’s website, are described as ‘risky speculations [that] became quite practical propositions for infrastructural intervention’, with many starting ‘with concrete history’ and being performed with ‘a poetic cinematic language [that] would provide the most direct expression of what is most at stake’. The performances, delivered on stage in outdoor spaces in front of live audiences, all follow a very similar stylized format: students present their projects taking the participant role of a narrator who embeds their proposed technology in a story that unfolds in fictional and non-fictional spaces/times mixed altogether, from past to future, and which involves utopian and/or dystopian scenarios that their proposed interventions are supposed to address. Taken together, these examples show the formation of the focal infrastructural web as a site of struggle whereby stylized performances and narrated technological artefacts constitute key discursive features in defining what counts as ‘doing speculative architecture’. These features contribute to making this type of professional subject recognizable within new expert-based institutional networks which provided postgraduate students with access to a valuable transnational network of actors, institutions, and economic markets; they allow new professionals in urban design and architecture to become employable subjects with potential to participate in emerging niches within yet-to-be urban spaces. Further to this, the category of ‘speculative architect’ and the set of values (i.e. criticality) and forms of knowledge (i.e. European and 104

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American academic expertise) indexed by the performance of doing speculative architecture, constitute a ‘bundle of skills’ (Urciuoli 2008) with exchange value: they provide this new repackaged professional subject with the necessary cultural capital, legitimacy, and authority to operate within emerging economic niches while simultaneously helping to reinstate longstanding colonial forms of territorial differentiation and hierarchization at a larger scale in which European and American experts/institutions act as producers of technological forms of knowledge that are then applied into growing economic territories. As such, the circulation of these forms of professional knowledge and subjectivities favours ‘the recruitment of certain kinds of actors to growth hubs’ (Ong 2006: 6). On the one hand, they offer an infrastructure that regulate a particular population, that of professional architects, for ‘optimal productivity, increasingly through spatial practices that engage market forces’ (ibid.); on the other hand, the training component of this infrastructure relies ‘on an array of knowledge and expert systems to induce self-animation and self-government’ (ibid.), this allowing yet-to-be speculative architects to ‘optimize choices, efficiency, and competitiveness’ (ibid.) by actively engaging in scripting the discourse register of doing speculative architecture.

Future directions and recommendations for practice The contributions presented illustrate two (of many) possible ways of undertaking analysis of institutional discourse. Zsófia’s interest in metaphors and narratives as the entry point to palliative care professionals’ views of good versus bad deaths places verbal language produced during research interviews at the centre of her account, paving the way for further considerations of wider institutional conditions under which her participants’ narrations and metaphors take shape. For Miguel, a focus on processes of discourse enregisterment drives attention towards the set of communicative practices that allows professionals-in-the-making to be socially recognized as performing the social persona of a speculative architect within the logic of a transnational web of institutions that connects universities, think tanks, private companies, and governmental agencies. In both cases, though, a shared interest in institutions as sites of struggle pinpoints ways in which linguistic/semiotic practices (narratives, metaphors, registers), moral categories (‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘appropriate’), and social relations (between patients and healthcare practitioners, between knowledge producers and knowledge consumers) sustain and get assembled under specific historical, socioeconomic, and political conditions (neoliberal rationalities, colonial dynamics of market expansion). We expect research on institutional discourse to continue to emphasize wider, larger-scale social transformations both in an explanatory role and as an object of critique, in line with the spatial, biopolitical, and affective turns experienced in social sciences more broadly (Lefebvre 1974; Foucault 2008; Ahmed 2004) and the greater focus on cultural relations between the material environment, meaning-making, and subjectivity that they have brought with them (Garrido 2021). At the same time, and due to the complexity of understanding these social processes and relations, we also expect more in-depth conceptual engagement with social theory alongside larger projects involving multidisciplinarity. This, in our view, requires an increasing use of multifaceted datasets across many disciplines, with an interest in capturing the circulation of knowledge, artefacts, and categories of personhood within institutional networks and the social relations and forms of inequality that this circulation enables. It also makes it unavoidable to foreground ways in which these institutional dynamics are entrenched with larger histories of capitalism and colonialism (Heller and McElhinny 2017). A focus of this sort is becoming particularly pertinent in light of the immense disruption to working practices and working subjects that the COVID-19 pandemic brought about, trends 105

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it has accelerated, and the stark inequalities that it has both revealed and exacerbated. This has gone hand in hand – true to institutions as sites of struggle – with the emergence of social movements challenging established institutional logics by attempting to institute or institutionalize alternative ones (e.g. the commons and their challenge to capitalist frameworks, categories, and subjectivities). These spaces and institutions offer us potentially imaginative new ways of being/doing, and we hope that future research on institutional discourse will help us understand these processes too (MIRCo 2020). We also believe that it is key to maintain a reflexive stance towards what we do as knowledge producers who very often speak from higher education institutions and whose forms of validation and recognition can also contribute to masking broader inequalities, especially socioeconomic ones (Keating 2019). We work within institutions and, as the work reviewed in this chapter demonstrates, have to assume that we are not without responsibility in the workings and effects of their ways of being.

Related topics business communication; medical communication; globalization; linguistic ethnography; critical discourse analysis; linguistic anthropology

Further reading Sarangi, S. and Roberts, C. (1999) (Eds.) Talk, Work and Institutional Order: Discourse in Medical, Mediation and Management Settings. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter. (This is a seminal exploration of discourse within a range of institutional settings.) Blommaert, J. (2005) Discourse: A Critical introduction. Cambridge University Press. (This is an essential reading on discourse.)

References Agha, A. (2007) Language and Social Relation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ahmed, S. (2004) The Cultural Politics of Emotion, London: Routledge. Angermeyer, P. (2009) ‘Translation style and participant roles in court interpreting’, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 13(1): 3–28. Atkinson, J. M. and Drew, P. (1979) Order in Court, Oxford: Socio-Legal Studies. Bamberg, M. and Georgakopoulou, A. (2008) ‘Small stories as a new perspective in narrative and identity analysis’, Text & Talk, 28(3): 377–396. Bauman, R. and Briggs, C. (2003) Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Beverungen, A., Dunne, S. and Hoedemækers, C. (eds.) (2009) ‘The university of finance’, Ephemera: Theory & Politics in Organization, 9(4). Blommaert, J. (2005) Discourse: A Critical introduction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cameron, B. (2000) Good to Talk?: Living and Working in a Communication Culture, London and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Campbell, S. and Roberts, C. (2007) ‘Migration, ethnicity and competing discourses in the job inter-view: Synthesizing the institutional and the personal’, Discourse & Society, 18(3): 243–271. Carpentier, N. and van Brussel, L. (2012) ‘On the contingency of death: A discourse-theoretical perspective on the construction of death’, Critical Discourse Studies, 9(2): 99–115. Codó, E. (2008) Immigration and Bureaucratic Control: Language Practices in Public Administration, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Codó, E. and Pérez-Milans, M. (2014) ‘Multilingual discursive practices and processes of social change in globalizing institutional spaces: A critical ethnographic perspective’, International Journal of Multilingualism, 11(4): 1–8. 106

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Cottrell, L. and Duggleby, W. (2016) ‘The “good death”: An integrative literature review’, Palliative and Supportive Care, 1–27. Deetz, S. and Mumby, D. (1985) ‘Metaphors, information and power’, Information and Behaviour, 1: 369–386. Demjén, Z. and Semino, E. and Koller, V. (2016) ‘Metaphors for “good” and “bad” deaths: A health professional view’, Metaphor and the Social World, 6(1): 1–19. Drew, P. and Sorjonen, M.-L. (2011) ‘Dialogue in institutional interactions’, in T. A. van Dijk (ed.), Discourse Studies: A Multidisciplinary Introduction, London: Sage, pp. 191–216. Foucault, M. (1981) ‘The order of discourse’, in R. Young (ed.), Untying the Text, London: Routledge/ Kegan Paul. Foucault, M. (2008) ‘The birth of biopolitics’, in M. Sennellart (ed.), Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Garrido, M. R. (2021) Community, Solidarity and Multilingualism in a Transnational Social Movement: A Critical Sociolinguistic Ethnography of Emmaus, London: Routledge. Gumperz, J. (1992) ‘Interviewing in intercultural situations’, in P. Drew and J. Heritage (eds.), Talk at Work: Interaction in Social Settings, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hall, C., Slembrouck, S. and Sarangi, S. (2006) Language Practice in Social Work: Categorisation and Accountability in Child Welfare, London: Routledge. Heller, M. (1999) Linguistic Minorities and Modernity: A Sociolinguistic Ethnography, London: Longman. Heller, M. (2001) ‘Undoing the macro/micro dichotomy: Ideology and categorisation in a linguistic minority school’, in N. Coupland, S. Sarangi and C. Candlin (eds.), Sociolinguistics and Social Theory, London: Longman, pp. 212–234. Heller, M. and McElhinny, B. (2017) Language, Capitalism and Colonialism: Toward a Critical History, Toronto: Toronto University Press. Heydon, G. (2005) The Language of Police Interviewing: A Critical Analysis, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Keating, C. (2019) ‘Coloniality of knowledge, Ch’ixinakax utxiwa, and intercultural translation: The (im) pertinence of language and discourse studies’, Language, Culture and Society, 1(1): 141–146. Labov, W. (2013) The Language of Life and Death: The Transformation of Experience in Oral Narrative, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lefebvre, H. (1974) The Production of Space, Oxford: Blackwell. Lin, A. and Martin, P. (eds.) (2005) Decolonisation, Globalisation: Language-in-Education Policy and Practice, Clevedon/Buffalo/Toronto: Multilingual Matters. Lorente, B. (2017) Scripts of Servitude: Language, Labor Migration and Transnational Domestic Workers, Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Martín Rojo, L. (2010) Constructing Inequality in Multilingual Classrooms, Berlin: Mouton. Martín Rojo, L. and Del Percio, A. (eds.) (2019) Language and Neoliberal Governmentality, New York: Routledge. Mayr, A. (2008) Language and Power: An Introduction to Institutional Discourse, London: Continuum. Mayr, A. (2015) ‘Institutional discourse’, in D. Tannen, H. E. Hamilton and D. Schiffrin (eds.), The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, 2nd ed., Chichester: John Wiley & Sons. MIRCo (2020) ‘Pandemic discourses and the prefiguration of the future’, Language, Culture and Society, 2(2): 227–241. Moyer, M. (2011) ‘What multilingualism? Agency and unintended consequences of multilingual practices in a Barcelona health clinic’, Journal of Pragmatics, 43(5): 1209–1221. Mumby, D. K. and Clair, R. P. (1997) ‘Organizational discourse’, in T. A. van Dijk (ed.), Discourse as Social Action: Discourse Studies, Vol. 2: A Multidisciplinary Introduction, Newbury, CA: Sage. Ong, A. (2006) Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty, Durham: Duke University Press. Payne, S. A., Langley-Evans, A. and Hiller, R. (1996) ‘Perceptions of a “good” death: A comparative study of the views of hospice staff and patients’, Palliative Medicine, 10: 307–312. Pérez-Milans, M. and Guo, X. (2020) ‘Hoping for success, becoming a spiritual subject: Converted returnees in China’, Language, Culture and Society, 2(2): 197–226. Roberts, C. (2009) ‘Institutional discourse’, in J. Maybin and J. Swann (eds.), The Routledge Companion to English Language Studies, Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Roberts, C. (2011) ‘Institutional discourse’, in J. Simpson (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Applied Linguistics, Abingdon, UK: Routledge. 107

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Sarangi, S. and Roberts, C. (eds.) (1999) Talk, Work and Institutional Order: Discourse in Medical, Mediation and Management Settings, Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter. Sarangi, S. and Slembrouck, S. (1996) Language, Bureaucracy and Social Control, London: Longman. Scarre, G. (2012) ‘Can there be a good death?’, Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice, 18(5): 1082– 1086. Semino, E., Demjén, Z., Hardie, A., Payne, S. and Rayson, P. (2018) Metaphor, Cancer, and the End of Life: A Corpus-Based Study, New York: Routledge. Semino, E., Demjén, Z. and Koller, V. (2014) ‘“Good” and “bad” deaths: Narratives and professional identities in interviews with hospice managers’, Discourse Studies, 16(5): 667–685. Silverstein, M. (2005) ‘Axes of evals: Token versus type interdiscursivity’, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 15: 6–22. Simpson, J. (ed.) (2011) ‘Introduction’, in The Routledge Handbook of Applied Linguistics, Abingdon: Routledge. Smith, D. (2005) Institutional Ethnography: A Sociology for People, Toronto: Rowman & Littlefield. Smith, R. (2000) ‘A good death: An important aim for services and for us all’, BMJ, 320: 129–130. Thibodeau, P. H. and Boroditsky, L. (2011) ‘Metaphors we think with: The role of metaphor in reasoning’, PloS One, 6(2): 1–11. Urciuoli, B. (2008) ‘Skills and selves in the new workplace’, American Ethnologist, 35(2): 211–228. van Brussel, L. and Carpentier, N. (2012) ‘The discursive construction of the good death and the dying person: A discourse-theoretical analysis of Belgian newspaper articles on medical end-of-life decision making’, Journal of Language and Politics, 11(4): 479–499. Walter, T. (1994) The Revival of Death, London: Routledge. Walters, G. (2004) ‘Is there such a thing as a good death?’, Palliative Medicine, 18: 404–408.

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9 Medical communication Sarah Collins, Sarah Peters, and Ian Watt

Introduction This chapter centres on medical communication between patients and doctors. Reference is made to other healthcare professionals, recognizing the increasing diversity and range of specialisms involved in healthcare. Medical communication can be comprehensively viewed in terms of the doctor-patient relationship, which provides the foundations for establishing trust, rapport, and understanding, explaining diagnoses, discussing prognoses, and negotiating treatment. The ways doctors and patients convey their perspectives through language determine how the problem is understood, as well as giving the relationship therapeutic value.

Historical perspectives The 1950s witnessed the start of a growing body of cross-disciplinary work to develop understanding of the doctor-patient relationship, produce insights into language use in consultations, and engage professionals and the public in debates promoting patient involvement. Several strands developed in parallel: the therapeutic nature of the doctor-patient relationship (Balint 1957), doctors’ consulting behaviours (Byrne and Long 1976), biopsychosocial medicine (Engel 1977), and ethnographies of healthcare encounters (Sudnow 1967). Balint (1957) introduced the psychosocial element into understanding patients’ problems. Drawing on psychotherapeutic principles, Balint stressed the therapeutic value of doctors’ communication and relationship with patients, turning attention to listening to the patient and treating their language as diagnostically and therapeutically relevant. Byrne and Long (1976) conducted a study of over 2,000 audio-recordings of primary care consultations. They identified six consultation phases: establishing a relationship, discovering the reason for attendance, conducting verbal and/or physical examination, evaluating the patient’s condition, detailing treatment or investigation, and closing. Byrne and Long’s analyses focused on doctors’ language and actions, treating these as causal. They appraised the effectiveness of individual consultations, describing doctors’ language use. They observed that dysfunctional consultations tended to contain less silence. The fourth phase (evaluating the patient’s condition) was accorded little attention, with most doctors moving from examining DOI: 10.4324/9781003082637-11

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the patient to detailing treatment ‘with hardly a word to the patient en route’ (Byrne and Long 1976: 50). A spectrum of consulting styles (doctor-centred to patient-centred) were observed. Sudnow (1967) conducted an ethnographic study of death and dying, in two hospitals. His observations of staff’s words and actions showed how death and dying is differently pronounced for patients according to individual and sociodemographic characteristics and how a hospital’s organization impacts communication between staff, patients, and relatives. Sudnow described how nurses approached the relative of a dying patient in such a way as to prepare them for what lay ahead and for meeting with the doctor before any words were uttered. He recorded the words staff used to report a death to each other and how their reports were differently phrased for relatives. He identified differential applications of terms such as ‘dead on arrival’ according to an individual’s socioeconomic characteristics, highlighting inequalities. Understanding communication in healthcare consultations has thus evolved through combinations of disciplinary approaches in response to particular societal expectations (e.g. what a patient wants from their doctor). These early studies drew on language and communication to explain complex processes within the doctor-patient relationship.

Critical issues and topics Since the 1980s, medical communication has developed as a research field (see e.g. Ong et al. 1995; Stewart et al. 2003; Barnes 2019). Predominantly focused on general practice (family physician) consultations, studies have highlighted a range of communication features and dimensions playing a part in healthcare.

Language and communication in the general practice consultation General practice consultation studies include empirical analyses of details of language use and interaction, explorations of patients’ and doctors’ perceptions and communication experiences, and conceptual studies of patient-centredness and shared decision-making. Conversation analysis research has focused on consultation activities. Heritage and Stivers (1999) identified how doctors’ ‘online commentaries’ during physical examination can provide reassurance, justify a forthcoming diagnostic evaluation, and shape patients’ expectations towards ‘no-problem’ explanations. Stivers (2005) described different formats for doctors’ presentations of non-antibiotic treatment recommendations, showing that doctors who provide a specific, positive recommendation, followed by a negative one, are most likely to obtain patient acceptance. Discourse analytic studies have addressed themes such as patient narratives, how decisions are managed and negotiated, and cultural inferences and interpretations. Studies adopting a narrative-based approach (Greenhalgh and Hurwitz 2004) have attended to how symptomatic information provided by a patient is contextualized through the ‘story’ they tell in consultations. In hearing patients’ stories, doctors begin the cognitive processes of prediction, evaluation, planning, and explanation through the patient’s words and connections between symptoms, events, and illness episodes. In research on decision-making, Elwyn et al. (1999) identified that primary care consultations containing conflict about treatment for upper respiratory tract infection exhibited none of the ideological competencies of ‘shared decision-making’. To address differences in understanding between patients and doctors, Elwyn et al. argued that detailed empirical research and revision of shared decision-making concepts are required. Land et al.’s (2017) systematic 110

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review of interactional linguistic research on shared decision-making, which recommends investigation of a range of secondary care settings. Roberts et al. (2005) explored how patients with limited English and culturally diverse communication styles consulted with doctors in the UK. They identified four dimensions contributing to misunderstandings: pronunciation and word stress; intonation and speech delivery; grammar, vocabulary, and lack of contextual information; and styles of self-presentation. In a study of the relationship between patients’ expectations, consultation characteristics, and healthcare outcomes, Mercer et al. (2016) found that patients in areas of socioeconomic deprivation had less desire for involvement in decisions and perceived their doctors as less empathic than those in affluent groups. This and other studies highlight the scope for more research addressing equality, diversity, and inclusion through language use in healthcare communication. While much of the research on communication in the consultation centres on words used and how they are said, some specifically consider the relationship between verbal and nonverbal elements. For example, Ruusuvuori (2001) discriminated between patient-embodied actions and patient-inscribed actions that draw on information sources such as case notes, showing how doctors’ bodily movements can present problems for patients in determining whether the doctor is listening and can disrupt the flow of talk. In paediatric consultations, gaze direction has been noted to be one communication practice through which doctors’ questions target either the child or the parent as respondent (Stivers 2001). Observational, survey, interview, and focus group studies have explored patients’ health and illness beliefs and doctors’ responses (e.g. Britten et al. 2000), patients’ views of patientcentredness (e.g. Little et al. 2001), doctors’ views of shared decision-making (e.g. Elwyn et al. 2000), and trust, empathy, and validation (Wright et al. 2004; Dieppe et al. 2020). Britten et al.’s (2000) study combined audio-recorded consultations and semi-structured interviews to explore prescribing misunderstandings. The 14 categories of misunderstanding identified were all associated with a lack of patient participation in the consultation and carried potential or actual adverse outcomes: for example, the patient deciding not to take a prescribed medicine. Britten et al. found that patients’ preferences and expectations about medicines were rarely voiced in the consultations and doctors were unaware of their relevance for successful prescribing. Little et al.’s (2001) survey of patient-centredness demonstrated that patients valued communication and partnership highly in consultations. Elwyn et al.’s (2000) exploration of doctors’ views concerning shared decision-making, through focus groups, revealed doctors’ ideological principles and consultation practices, adding to existing models (e.g. Towle and Godolphin 1999): participating doctors stressed the importance of portraying options before sounding out the patient’s wishes for involvement in decision-making. Wright et al. (2004) interviewed patients with breast cancer, finding that they valued trust in doctors’ expertise above the communication skills (e.g. demonstrating empathy) doctors are traditionally taught. They gauged trust in terms of displays of technical expertise, ‘being frank’, and ‘answer[ing] questions without hesitation’. This research has been paralleled by conceptual work on patient-centredness (e.g. Stewart 2001), patient participation (e.g. Coulter 2002) and shared decision-making (e.g. Towle and Godolphin 1999), reflecting the shift from a paternalistic view to one where the patient brings their expertise and knowledge to the consultation and shared decision-making can occur. Research has also identified how these ideals may be realized in practice, exploring the patient’s role in decision-making, to identify strategies for patients to benefit most from consultations (Tuckett et al. 1985); how patients interpret measures of their involvement (Entwistle et al. 111

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2004); the various forms patient participation takes (Collins et al. 2007); and how to establish effective, negotiated, collaborative partnerships in consultations (Fischer and Ereaut 2012). Taken together, these studies afford a view of the healthcare consultation in which different applications of language research combine to provide insights into details of interaction and language use (word choices, treatment options phrasings, non-verbal cues) as well as patients’ expressed views and preferences, their interpretations of the care they receive, and doctors’ intentions and ideals. These observations help build understanding of how the doctor-patient relationship, as the foundation of effective healthcare, is established and maintained.

Extending the view beyond the general practice consultation Research has extended to other types of healthcare consultation, allowing comparative research across clinical settings and health professionals, to identify unique and shared communication features. Studies in hospital consultations involving carers, nursing, pharmacy, physiotherapy, and complementary and alternative medicine, for example, all illustrate dimensions for further research. Salter et al.’s (2007) study of pharmacists’ home visits to the elderly revealed how pharmacists’ advice may be ill-fitted and met with resistance. In a comparison of GP and hospital surgeon’s decision-making, Braddock et al. (1999) found that both groups infrequently had complete discussions of treatment decisions with patients. Coupland et al. (1994), studying doctor-patient communication in a geriatric outpatients’ clinic, observed doctors continuing social, conversational lines, when patients indicated readiness to move to the medical agenda. Beresford and Sloper (2003) documented influences of chronic illness and parental involvement on adolescents’ communication with doctors. They discovered how the series of questions deployed by doctors to monitor everyday illness management deterred adolescents from participating, how talking with parents provided opportunities to rehearse concerns before consulting with the doctor, and how a sustained relationship with their doctor enabled adolescents to talk openly about adherence to lifestyle and treatment. In complementary and alternative medicine research, randomized controlled trials have explored whether the practitioner-patient relationship can enhance treatment effects. Kaptchuk et al.’s (2008) study with three participant groups (one receiving real acupuncture, one sham acupuncture, and one no acupuncture) revealed no therapeutic difference between sham and real acupuncture groups, suggesting that the process of receiving care may have its own beneficial placebo effect, and highlighting the therapeutic effects of communication and the patient-practitioner relationship. Such studies invite comparison and further research: the ways doctors engage with patients in conversation as well as formal interaction, blurring distinctions between social and medical talk; how a policy intervention, such as pharmacists’ home visits to the elderly, may be ill-fitted to certain healthcare contexts or professional roles; ways of isolating communication’s therapeutic effects; and communication features that promote patients’ participation.

Cultural and linguistic diversity Cultural and linguistic healthcare research (Roberts 2007) has explored differences in cultural understandings of illness, the influences of multiple languages in a consultation, and how perceptions of race, education, and social class shape doctor-patient communication.

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Kirmayer and Young (1998) report in their review of physical symptoms in the absence of pathology, that while this phenomenon is observed across all ethnocultural groups and societies studied, there are significant cultural variations. One possible explanation is that patients’ reports of bodily symptoms encode cultural models that furnish their vocabulary for describing symptoms, as well as a means of explaining them. One cultural difference concerned how distress is expressed: for example, the idiom ‘heart distress’ among Iranians is a culturally prescribed way of talking about grief (Kirmayer and Young 1998: 424). More recent research (Bayliss et al. 2014) suggests that cultural factors influence not only how patients present symptoms but also each stage of diagnosis and management. Research on consultations involving more than one language has explored the linguistic challenges such consultations present, as well as highlighting features of language use pertaining to all consultations. Studies have shown how interpreters not only convey the meaning of the patient’s words but also are pivotal in negotiating and achieving interactional goals, with consequences for care. Reporting symptoms and arriving at a diagnosis can be shaped by what the interpreter says and how they present the patient’s problem in medical and lay terms. Davidson (2000) found that in consultations with English-speaking doctors, Spanish-speaking patients were left with unaddressed concerns, and Bolden (2000) found that the interpreter was oriented to achieving the goals of history-taking in what they perceived to be the most efficient manner, editing out patient information and words they considered irrelevant. Where the patient and doctor speak different languages, patients have reported less-than-satisfactory interpersonal care, with or without an interpreter. In such consultations, patients are more likely to have their comments ignored (Rivadeneyra et al. 2000), and in the absence of an interpreter, discussion of health promotion is limited (NgoMetzger et al. 2007). Racial and ethnic disparities in quality of care for those with access to a healthcare system exist in the utilization of diagnostic procedures and therapeutic interventions. One root cause is variations in patients’ ability to communicate their symptoms to a doctor who understands their meaning, expectations of care, and adherence to lifestyle and medication regimes (van Ryn and Burke 2000). Stivers and Majid’s (2007) study of doctors’ questioning in consultations about routine childhood illnesses demonstrated the effect of parents’ race and education on whether physicians select children to answer questions. Black children and Latino children of low-education parents were less likely to be selected to answer questions than their same-aged white peers, irrespective of their education.

Linguistic analysis as a diagnostic resource A recent advance in applications of linguistics to medical communication concerns how patients’ language use can be a diagnostic resource. In psychiatry, doctors depend on patients’ language for diagnosis and treatment, but how words actually function in consultations to influence diagnostic reasoning and treatment decisions remains under-researched (Fine 2006). Schwabe et al. (2008) have identified features of patients’ language that may be instrumental in differentiating between epileptic (ES) and non-epileptic seizures (NES). Patients with ES provide coherent accounts of individual seizures, relate subjective seizure experiences and use consistent metaphoric conceptualizations. Patients with NES tend not to volunteer subjective seizure symptoms, give accounts that are difficult to understand, and are inconsistent in their choice of metaphors.

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The patient’s illness experience Increased emphasis on listening to and understanding the patient’s perspective has invited reconsideration of how, through medical communication, patients can inform medical understanding of particular diseases, the nature of pain and how it may be described, and connections between symptoms. One example is patients whose symptoms are not easily defined or explained according to current knowledge and understanding of physical pathology. Medically unexplained symptoms (MUS) not only present a cognitive challenge for doctors in making confident use of the label but also pose a linguistic one: how to explain and negotiate the ‘unexplained’. Theoretical understanding of MUS initially led researchers to conceive of these problems as caused by underlying psychological disorder (Lipowski 1988). Applications of linguistics have led to more fruitful ways to understand MUS. Analyses of consultations have revealed complex interactions and negotiations whereby patients assert authority over their condition (Peters et al. 1998) to shape the consultation and its outcomes, securing referral to specialists (Salmon et al. 1999). A particular tension, played out through language use, has been highlighted, in which both patients and doctors use scientific discourse but for different reasons: the doctor to maintain distance and expert stance and the patient to engage the doctor (Chew-Graham et al. 2008). Analyzing patients’ perceptions of their symptoms revealed that, rather than having unidimensional causal beliefs, individuals with MUS had multifaceted understandings of their condition that recognized psychosocial factors (Peters et al. 2009). Patients’ own rich illness models contrasted with their perceptions of doctors’ more simplistic understanding. This led to patients’ mistrusting their doctors, limiting the information they disclosed. Empathic responses to emotional cues appear critical for reassurance and building trust among patients with MUS (Epstein et al. 2007). A recent systematic review (Stortenbeker et al. 2020) highlights the importance of attending to linguistic and interactional features of patients’ symptom presentations, as tailoring medical explanations and responses accordingly enables effective management and care.

Influences of technology Influences of new technology on medical communication have been manifold: electronic patient records, email for consulting, telephone helplines, templates and aids for decisionmaking, and remote, online, and telephone consulting (Downes et al. 2017). The COVID-19 pandemic has had a major impact on how patients communicate with doctors in many countries, with an increase in remote consultations via email, telephone, and video. Remote consultations may increase access to some patient groups but limit access to others and may not be as information rich as if face-to-face (Hammersley et al. 2019). The range of remote consulting formats provides opportunities to research this linguistically (Greenhalgh et al. 2016): to explore the nuances of language use, the impact of lack of non-verbal cues (eye contact, body language), scope for building and maintaining rapport, and how vulnerable groups adapt to remote technologies. The presence of the computer in consultations hinders and promotes communication, revealing dimensions of non-verbal and verbal activity. Hsu et al. (2005) observed that doctors’ baseline communication skills (verbal and non-verbal) were amplified, positively or negatively, by the introduction of a computer. Margalit et al. (2006) found that time gazing at the screen was inversely related to clinician engagement in psychosocial questioning and emotional responsiveness, and time spent typing was inversely related to the amount of dialogue. McGrath et al. 114

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(2007) found that patients exploited silences created by the doctor’s use of electronic patient records to ask questions.

Cultural models, broader discourses, and media representations While research on language and medicine has centred on examining the structure and content of the doctor-patient encounter, communication realms beyond the consultation have also been investigated. Bell’s (2009) study of cultural models of chemotherapy expressed in a cancer support group shows how patients’ understandings of chemotherapy diverge from biomedical treatment models. Iedema’s (2007) investigation of the discourse of hospital communication explores complexities of the healthcare system and shows how health professionals are compelled to reinvent their communication strategies to manage changes in the system and their relationships with each other. Through textual discourse analysis of policy documents and interviews with policy-makers and stakeholders, Shaw and Greenhalgh (2008) assessed how policy has shifted healthcare research away from independent enterprise towards a strategic resource and ‘population laboratory’ for large-scale clinical trials.

Main research methods The diverse methods employed to study medical communication include conversation analysis (Heritage and Maynard 2006), interactional analysis (Roberts et al. 2005), and coding schemes (Roter and Larson 2002); corpus linguistics (Harvey et al. 2007); surveys (Little et al. 2001); semi-structured interviews (Wright et al. 2004); focus groups (Bell 2009); observation and ethnography (Sudnow 1967); document analysis (Shaw and Greenhalgh 2008); and randomized controlled trials (Heritage et al. 2007). Regardless of the methods, researching medical communication presents ethical dilemmas and sensitivities that shape the nature of the data and its analysis. Obtaining consent, positioning recording equipment in a clinic or home, being party to a person’s experience of illness: all bring further insights. During data collection in a cancer drop-in centre, Watts (2008) reported how her position shifted from initiating contact, asking direct questions, and doing the talking to one in which participants chose the point of contact and topic of discussion, seeking her out to report how they were managing, often during crisis. Particular methods (or combinations) may be more suited, in researching aspects of medical communication. Harvey et al. (2007: 772) argue that, in researching adolescent health communication, corpus linguistics enables description of a distinctive ‘genre’ of messages about sexual health. Comparative keyword analysis, employed by Seale et al. (2006) in exploring gender differences in patients’ talk about cancer experience, represents a use of software for corpus linguistic analysis to conduct comparative qualitative analyses of large datasets. Conversation or discourse analysis of recorded consultations has been productively combined with interviews exploring participants’ perspectives and measuring outcomes (Barry et al. 2001). An important distinction concerns the aims and effects of descriptive, compared to evaluative, approaches. Is the purpose to describe what happens, or does the research aim to improve the quality of healthcare? This inevitably shapes the choice of methods and the results. For example, in coding consultations, some schemes make assumptions, such as what constitutes ‘good’ or ‘bad’ communication (Hall et al. 1987), while others, not based on a particular premise, allow testing of theories (e.g. Salmon et al. 2006). Some, like the Patient Enablement 115

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Index (Mercer and Howie 2006) or VR-CoDES-P (del Piccolo et al. 2011) combine a research schema with evaluation of doctors’ consultation skills. Some studies highlight how chosen methods allow unexpected findings to surface. O’Riordan et al.’s (2008) study of ‘likeable’ patients employed concordance software alongside interviews, to discover themes: for example, the words ‘time’ and ‘years’ recurred frequently, revealing how continuity in general practice nurtured relationships with patients. Many studies involve comparison (e.g. professional versus conversational talk; one disease setting, or professional culture, with another; patient’s versus doctor’s perspectives), revealing points of difference and similarity for investigation. For example, distinctive features of doctors’ versus nurses’ communication with patients highlight complements between them for multidisciplinary healthcare (Collins 2005; Rowbotham et al. 2012; Scholz et al. 2020).

Effects of language use and communication on healthcare outcomes Increasingly, communication is recognized as impacting on healthcare outcomes. Communication can positively influence adherence to treatment (Dowell et al. 2002). Studies exploring socio-relational factors, such as patients’ satisfaction and feelings of ease, show that greater consultation length and continuity of care are positively correlated with patients’ satisfaction (Mercer and Howie 2006). In consultations where patients perceived that they found common ground with their doctor in decision-making, there were significantly fewer referrals and investigations over the following two months (Stewart et al. 1997). Research has also shown how patients’ recall and understanding of information may be influenced through communication; Britten et al. (2000) noted that doctors could avoid misunderstandings by asking patients directly what they thought about taking medicines. In a randomized controlled trial, Heritage et al. (2007) found that, depending on doctors’ phrasing to elicit concerns (‘anything else’ vs ‘something else’), the patient may be more or less likely to mention what is troubling them.

Medical education Developments in medical education have given prominence to the importance of communication training, pre- and post-qualification. This training is modelled on professional guidelines for good medical practice (General Medical Council 2020) that pay close attention to the communication competencies and standards required for maintaining caring relationships with patients. Clinician educators are expected to bring knowledge of communication and related research, as well as medicine, to their teaching. Communication training involves patient perspectives, with actors providing safe space to practise (Pritchard et al. 2020) and patients as real-life informants with illness narratives to explore (Muir 2007). Medical communication curricula are increasingly informed by research. The content employed across the UK for consultation skills teaching is based on the Calgary-Cambridge framework (Kurtz et al. 2005) compiled from consultation research. Curricular design has also been informed by the literature, taking an integrative view of the consultation (Stewart et al. 2003) in which clinical, biomedical tasks are fused with psychosocial dimensions and patients’ perspectives. Medical education is a growing field of research in which linguistic approaches are employed to inform analyses and to define areas for study. For example, regarding communication skills assessment, Roberts et al. (2003) video-recorded students’ consultation performance in clinical exams and analyzed these recordings to investigate interaction features that lead to students 116

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being assessed as ‘good’ or ‘poor’ communicators. They were able to show, through reference to a range of constituents, how stronger candidates were ‘empathetic’ (responding attentively and using joint problem-solving) and weaker candidates were ‘retractive’ (responding inappropriately and demonstrating insensitivity to patients’ understandings). Humphris and Kaney (2001) devised a coding scheme to assess students’ communication development throughout their training. Students’ performance improved over a 17-month period, but their knowledge and understanding at initial assessment did not show the predicted association with subsequent communication skills performance. Analyses of doctors’ postgraduate consultation skills assessments (Campion et al. 2002) identified that doctors find ‘explanation and planning’ challenging and generally underperform in this area. A recent systematic review (McLoughlin et al. 2018) pinpointed factors influencing performance and examiners’ assessment and impacting on language and communication, including gender, ethnicity, and variations in the empathy demonstrated. Peters et al. (2011) found that medical students were confident in structuring and managing interaction flow but least confident in managing emotional encounters, an aspect qualified doctors also find challenging. Conceptual understanding of medical communication is also being advanced through applied linguistics research. Dynamic relationships between patient participation, cultural competency, and ethnolinguistic diversity (Betancourt et al. 2003; Rocque et al. 2019) are continually reconsidered in light of ongoing diversity and changes in ethnic and sociodemographic compositions of patient and doctor populations.

Future trajectory and new debates Medical communication research is an expanding field, in which linguistic expertise plays an increasing part, offering exciting opportunities for cross-disciplinary dialogues. Many areas remain under-researched: such as consultations involving different languages (Shaw and Ahmed 2004; Rocque et al. 2019). Certain linguistic approaches remain underused: for example, dialect variation and linguistic accommodation can be employed to study professional cultures and communication practices in consultations for inclusive healthcare, and multidisciplinary studies, combining linguistics with health and social sciences, enables investigation of the relationship between culture, communication, and health inequalities for refugee and migrant populations (Piacentini et al. 2019). Applied linguistics also offers avenues to explore how the language we use to describe medical communication creates a particular impression or reality, such as the term ‘patient-centred care’, or to help challenge assumptions in medical communication practice: for example, how precisely can the roles of relatives (as carer, interpreter, advocate) in a consultation facilitate the patient’s participation, and in what ways? By the same token, medical communication has much to offer applied linguistics. Medical communication compels researchers to make language-based studies relevant to healthcare professionals’ and patients’ experience. It is useful to consider whether the ways we apply linguistics to medical communication do translate into practice and what is relevant to professional and patient experience (Roberts and Sarangi 2003). For example, when it is advocated that health professionals ‘weave between’ medical and patient perspectives (Stewart et al. 2003) how does this translate into the language of the consultation? While medical students are taught skills such as summarizing or particular phrases to use (in eliciting patients’ concerns for example), how doctors use such skills and techniques in everyday practice, and to what effect, remains unclear. Developing methods and approaches for creating linguistic interventions to improve healthcare outcomes, based on descriptive research studies, will enable observation 117

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and measurement of the value of applied linguistics in medical practice and its contributions to patient experience and healthcare outcomes (Barnes 2019). The medical consultation and the patient-professional relationship are coming under new forms of scrutiny as healthcare systems and research methods evolve. Consultation research is increasingly diverse, including the range of healthcare professional encounters with patients, uses of Internet and remote consulting, consultations in different languages, and commentaries and debates on the patient-healthcare professional relationship. This reflects healthcare’s growing complexities and degrees of specialization. From the research methods perspective, there is likely to be continued refinement and interfacing with other disciplines (Candlin and Candlin 2003). Comparative and longitudinal research, using combined methods, will promote further systematic, detailed exploration, facilitated by shared databases (Herxheimer and Ziebland 2008; Jepson et al. 2017). Comparisons between ordinary conversation and medical and other institutional encounters will enable healthcare communication to be precisely located and comprehensively understood.

Summary This chapter reviews research concerning language use in medical communication. The doctorpatient relationship has provided the impetus for a broad range of studies investigating different dimensions of medical communication. Conceptual and empirical work has sought to describe the constituents of patient-centred approaches in healthcare delivery, from the level of individual words and actions in consultations, patient and health professional perspectives and experiences, and ideological and policy-driven discourses. Medical communication research has employed novel uses of linguistic methods of analysis. These applications of linguistics help promote understanding of how healthcare is delivered to and taken up by patients and are proving increasingly relevant to healthcare education and practice.

Related topics clinical linguistics; institutional discourse; intercultural communication; conversation analysis; linguistic ethnography

Further reading Balint, M. (1957) The Doctor, the Patient, and his Illness, New York: International Universities Press. (This pioneering work focuses attention on the patient as a person in the consultation and on the patient’s language.) Heritage, J. and Maynard, D. W. (eds.) (2006) Communication in Medical Care, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (This collection of studies in primary care illustrates the potential of applying detailed analyses of language use in interaction to the study of medical communication.) Kurtz, S., Silverman, J. and Draper, J. (2005) Teaching and Learning Communication Skills in Medicine, 2nd ed., Oxford: Radcliffe Medical Press. (Kurtz et al. provide a comprehensive review of medical communication research, in their internationally recognized framework for teaching consultation skills to doctors.)

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10 English for professional communication A critical genre analytical perspective Vijay K. Bhatia and Aditi Bhatia

Introduction English for professional communication, as understood today, represents a development that integrates three main areas of study. The first one is English for specific purposes (ESP), which draws its strength from linguistics, particularly sociolinguistics, through the analyses of functional variation in language use. In fact, the ESP tradition can be considered an outcome of various forms of academic and disciplinary discourses within the framework of register analysis (Halliday et al. 1964) and genre analysis (Swales 1990, 2004, 2009). The second one is the business communication tradition that has been influenced by communication studies, which has several dimensions, including organizational communication, management communication, and corporate communication. Unlike ESP, which draws its inspiration from language description, none of these rather different sub-areas of communication studies have traditionally relied on various communication theories. It is interesting to note that these major traditions (i.e. ESP and communication studies) developed almost independently of each other and remained so for a long time. The third tradition, which seems to have influenced both these approaches to specialist language teaching and training, is the analyses of functional variation in academic and professional genres. Although analysis of linguistic variation, either as register or genre, did not have much of an impact on business communication earlier, it started influencing the design and implementation of both the ESP and the business communication programmes in the last few years, which has brought the two approaches close to each other. This overlapping interest in the analysis of discourse variation has also made it possible to view the two approaches as English for professional communication (EPC), which is represented in Bhatia and Bremner (2014) as follows: We would now like to give more substance to this view of professional communication as emerging from the recent works published in these areas of study and application. Let us briefly look at the historical developments in the field.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003082637-12

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Figure 10.1 English for professional communication overlaps

Historical perspective English for specific purposes (ESP) ESP has frequently been driven by descriptions of restricted uses of language, initially identified as register (Halliday et al. 1964) and then as discourse (Widdowson 1973) with emphasis on coherence and organization. Register analysis drew its inspiration from the work of Halliday et al. (1964) on functional variation in English, which put forward the notion that ‘language varies as its function varies; it differs in different situations’ (87). A variety of language distinguished according to its use was deemed a register. Halliday et al. further argued that registers could be differentiated as sub-codes of a particular language based on the occurrence of lexico-grammatical features. It was possible, thus, to characterize the registers of individual disciplinary discourses by identifying the use of an above-average incidence of specific sets of lexico-grammatical features. There have since been several studies identifying and describing typical characteristics of academic and professional registers, such as scientific English, business English, and legal English (cf. Waters 1997; Biber and Conrad 2019). In its earlier incarnations, ESP focused on English for science and technology (EST), following which, in the early 1990s, English for business purposes (EBP) became a more dominant area of study because of the globalization of trade and commerce, leading to the increased movement of business professionals across territorial, linguistic, cultural, and sociopolitical boundaries. This new business environment was buffered further by the advancement of 124

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multimedia and increased dependence on it by businesses and industries, with the result that the business professionals found themselves operating in a much more vibrant international marketplace. This sociocultural development led to research initiatives such as American business communication (cf. Reinsch 1996), correlating with the EBP/ESP tradition, the latter of which was typically British and European (Dudley-Evans and St. John 1998; Christian 1999, Hagen 1999; Bargiela-Chiappini and Nickerson 2001). Of course, a key advantage in identifying and analyzing ESP genres was using them as input for ESP and business communication programmes. For example, business communication became an effective and efficient way of training uninitiated learners or early-career professionals about the intricacies of business practices through study of both written and spoken modes.

Business communication Bargiela-Chiappini and Nickerson (2002), in their special issue of International Review of Applied Linguistics (IRAL) on business communication, presented business communication as talk and writing between individuals whose main activities and interests were in the domain of business and who come together for the purpose of doing business within a corporate setting, whether physical or virtual. In this regard, business communication seemed best understood as a discipline integrating communication in various business contexts, including organizational, corporate, and management. Business communication research received attention from various disciplines, training institutes, departments, and schools, including English, business and management, speech communications, and even information technology. The breadth of focus, over time, led to a lack of ‘comprehensive theoretical grounding’ (Shelby 1988: 13) or what Suchan and Charles (2006: 393) referred to as a specific research identity, since different disciplinary homes result[ed] in our using theories, frameworks, and information sources that lack[ed] significant overlap. This lack of overlap contribute[d] to the shapelessness of our field . . . [making] it difficult for us to define to our stakeholders and ourselves the work we do and the value it provides. However, interdisciplinarity across seemingly diverse disciplines must not be seen as undermining the contribution that each discipline makes towards a better understanding of the nature and function of communication in professional and corporate settings. Instead, it is a recognition of the complex and dynamic nature of the corporate world’s discursive realities that should be engaged with through multiple as well as complementary perspectives. Rogers (2001: 16) further reiterates that ‘there are signs that we’re growing more comfortable with our plurality, even beginning to acknowledge some of its value.’ In addition, the multidisciplinary convergence is not an entirely foreign concept as far as business communication research is concerned, as academics in this discipline have been ‘navigating multiple disciplines and diverse methods for some time now . . . diversity in backgrounds, cultures, approaches, and institutions has become central to our identity’ (15). The ability of business communication to draw from different fields only emphasizes its ‘unique place at the intersection of business and communication’ (Reinsch and Lewis 1993: 450). Any research pertaining to the influence of globalization necessitates multiparadigmatic approaches [to] facilitate the work of scholars who find both value and disappointment in various theoretical perspectives but who understand the need to 125

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acknowledge and integrate multiple approaches in an effort to clarify complex and obscure human and organizational phenomena. (Ulijn et al. 2000: 310–311)

Register and genre analysis Due to a perceived simplification of the relationship between linguistic analysis and pedagogic materials, as suggested by Halliday et al. (1964), there was also concern on the part of teachers regarding the lack of disciplinary knowledge of the professions they were required to serve (Swales 2000). ESP practitioners were well equipped to carry out relatively ‘thin’ descriptions of ESP discourses . . . [but what] they principally lacked was a perception of discourse itself and of the means for analysing and exploiting it – lacunae that were largely rectified by the 1980s. (Swales 2000: 60) This encouraged some researchers (Swales 1990; Bhatia 1993) to consider the aspect of discourse variation as genre with emphasis on wider context and conventions of language use (see Bhatia 2004 for a detailed account of the development of genre analysis; see Flowerdew, this Handbook, Volume 1). Both these approaches to discourse, as register and genre, have predominantly focused on language use in specific domains with varying degrees of attention to the contexts in which these discursive actions take place and are interpreted and often exploited. Consequently, in the last couple of decades, genre analysis has become a favoured framework for the study of professional practice as well as design of ESP programmes. The use of genre theory has become key in analyzing professional and academic discourses (Compagnone 2015; Zhu et al. 2016; McCarty and Swales 2017). Genre analysis has also become increasingly multi-perspective (Bhatia 2004, 2017) through an integration of various methodologies (Zhang 2007), such as textography (Swales 1998; AlAfnan 2016), corpus analysis (Fuertes-Olivera 2007; Hüttner et al. 2009; Singh et al. 2012), cross-cultural and intercultural perspectives (Ibrahim and Nambiar 2012; Kruse and Chitez 2012), and multimodal analysis (Bateman 2014; Hiippala 2014; Hafner 2018; Doody and Artemeva 2022). The implication for ESP is thus that text-based analyses of ESP discourses are increasingly inadequate in accounting for the typical use of language in various professional, particularly business contexts. One of the key aspects of genre analysis was that it considered communication not simply as a matter of putting words together in a grammatically correct and rhetorically coherent textual form but also as having a desired impact on how members of a specific professional community viewed it and how they negotiated meanings in professional documents. In this sense, written communication is regarded as more than knowing the semantics of lexico-grammar; it is a matter of understanding why members of a specific professional or disciplinary community communicate the way they do. This includes consideration of the discipline-specific knowledge of how professionals conceptualize issues and talk about them to achieve their disciplinary and professional goals. Often it is found that outsiders to any professional community are not able to follow what specialists write and talk about, even if they are able to understand every word of what is written or said. And being a native speaker, in this context, may not be an added benefit if one does not have enough understanding of the more intricate insider knowledge, including conventions of the genre and professional practice. Widdowson (1998) highlights 126

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this aspect of communicative efficiency when he indicates that genre analysis seeks to identify the conventions for language use in certain domains of professional and occupational activity. He further points out that it is a development from and an improvement on register analysis because it deals with discourse and not just text. It seeks to reveal how lexico-grammatical forms realize the conceptual and rhetorical structures and modes of thought and action, which are established as conventional for certain discourse communities. Genre analysis, thus, is about the conventions of thought and communication that define specific areas of professional genres and activities.

Critical issues In distinguishing critical issues in the further development of ESP and professional communication, we need to consider what Rogers (1998), with a background in management studies, implies to be key concerns. These include a joint and complementary focus on teaching and research in business communication, a more considered focus on authentic texts, the importance of continued multidisciplinarity in research, and consideration of cross-cultural communication contexts and intercultural negotiations. Rogers also argues that language learning, linguistic analyses, and discourse patterns are some of the main areas of research and investigation. In her subsequent study, Rogers (2000) says that in text-based genre analyses, there is a strong tendency to conceptualize communicative purposes in terms of the strategies of the speakers or writers, but such purposes cannot be fully understood without some understanding of how they are interpreted by members of the specialist community, for which she recommends user-based analyses. Rogers (2000) thus extends the boundaries of genre analysis to take it beyond the text to context and audience response, looking for the relevance of user-based analytical tools to analyse a small corpus of CEO presentations in the context of earning announcements. It comes to no surprise then that in much of Rogers’ work we find a fine integration of not simply the two strands of business communication and EBP but also of genre analysis. Similarly, Charles (1996) tries to fill this gap between a contextual business approach and a linguistic text-based approach by analyzing the ways in which the extra-linguistic ‘business context shapes negotiation discourse, and thus creates a mutual interdependency’ (20). Relatedly, Nickerson (1998), in her survey of the impact of corporate culture on non-native corporate writers working in a multinational and multilingual context and adopting an interdisciplinary approach incorporating ESP research and organizational theories, accounts for the general patterns of communication found within multinational corporations. Drawing attention to cross-cultural communication contexts, Gimenez’s (2001) study of business negotiations focuses on cross-cultural negotiations and communication styles, revealing that ‘cultural differences seemed to be overridden by the status-bound behaviour of the negotiators’ (188). Vergaro (2004) implements a contrastive study to investigate the rhetorical differences between Italian and English sales promotion letters, considered quite formulaic, to explore how information is presented and what rhetorical strategies are used to obtain compliance by a given readership in each culture. Planken (2005) explores how facework is used to achieve interpersonal goals in intercultural sales negotiations by undertaking linguistic analyses of rapport management that in a negotiation context is aimed at building a working relationship. From a communication-based angle, Varner (2000) views intercultural communication differently from intercultural business communication. He mentions that in intercultural business communication, the business strategies, goals, objectives, and practices become an integral part of the communication process, helping create a new environment out of the synergy 127

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of culture, communication, and business. He further argues that just as the study of culture is not an end in itself, in the study of intercultural business communication, the communication has a business purpose . . . channels, levels of formality, use of technology, content, and style of delivery are influenced by cultural and business considerations. The objectives of the business, the level of internationalization, the structure of organization . . . help determine the intercultural business communication strategy. (Varner 2000: 48–49) Bhatia (2004, 2008, 2010) argues that the study of conventional systems of genres (Bazerman 1994) often used to fulfil the professional objectives of specific disciplinary or professional communities may not be sufficient to understand the complexities of business communication. A comprehensive understanding of the motives and intentions of business practices is possible only if one goes beyond the textual constraints to look at the multiple discourses, actions, and voices that play a significant role in the formation of specific discursive practices within the institutional and organizational framework. As such, Bhatia (2010) develops the notion of ‘interdiscursivity’ as a function of appropriation of contextual and text-external generic resources within and across professional genres and professional practices. Similarly, Bremner (2008: 308) favours a more comprehensive understanding of interdiscursive voices in any system of activity. He points out that genres are interconnected in wider systems of activity, and they influence each other in the system. As such, a key feature of intertextuality to consider, then, is that it is not simply a link between texts, but a phenomenon that helps shape other texts: as genres combine to achieve different goals, they contribute to the development of new genres as they are recontextualised . . . the generic, linguistic and rhetorical choices that a writer makes will be influenced by the texts that precede or surround the text under construction and will in turn have an effect on the final textual product. (Bremner 2008: 308)

Insights from current research Recent work in critical genre theory (see Bhatia 2004, 2008, 2017) has clearly demonstrated the need to consider professional practices in addition to the discursive practices in specific professions. Let us briefly turn to some of the key developments in critical genre theory.

Critical genre analysis Genre analysis does not consider communication as just a representation of meaning through discursive artefacts; it is an attempt to understand why members of a specific disciplinary or professional community communicate the way they do (Bhatia 1993, 2004). This requires a shared understanding and discipline-specific awareness of how professionals conceptualize ideas, issues, arguments, and so on and talk about them to achieve their disciplinary and professional goals. Many of these crucial aspects of shared understanding in genre studies have traditionally been subsumed under context, which has often been assigned varying degrees of importance in the analytical literature in genre studies. However, in more recent literature, it has been assigned an increasingly prominent role, thus redefining genre as a configuration of 128

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text-external and text-internal resources, highlighting, at the same time, two kinds of relationships involving texts and contexts. As Bhatia (2010) points out, Interrelationships between and across texts focusing primarily on text-internal properties are viewed as intertextual in nature, whereas interactions across and between genres resulting primarily from text-external factors are seen as interdiscursive in nature. Bhatia (2017) considers three main aspects of critical genre analysis: • • •

Interdiscursivity Professional practice Multi-perspective approach

He considers interdiscursivity as central to our understanding of the complexities of professional genres, which are typical of professional, disciplinary, institutional, and other workplace contexts. Let us discuss two of the key aspects of critical genre analysis – namely, interdiscursivity and professional practice – which are centrally relevant to our discussion here.

Interdiscursivity Most professional genres operate simultaneously across four somewhat different yet overlapping levels to construct and interpret meanings in typical disciplinary, institutional, or professional contexts. It is interesting to note that though the ultimate product is the text, it is made possible by a combination of complex and dynamic range of resources other than what in linguistic and earlier discourse analytical literature is viewed as lexico-grammatical, rhetorical, and structural (Bhatia 2004). The other key contributors that make professional communication possible are conventions of the genre in question, the understanding of professional practice in which the genre is embedded, and the culture of the profession, discipline, or institution that constrains the use of textual resources for a particular discursive practice (Bhatia 2017). These two kinds of semiotic resources – text-internal and text-external – are exploited by specialists to achieve their specific objectives, but they also operate as constraints on most forms of discursive practices. Text-internal resources have been well-researched within the discourse and genre analytical literature highlighting the notion of intertextuality; however, text-external resources, which include the conventions that constrain generic constructs and professional practices and, perhaps more appropriately, specific disciplinary cultures that motivate these discursive and professional practices, have not been paid adequate attention. As an example, one can look at products from pharmaceutical companies that are invariably accompanied by leaflets which give details of the product, its composition, its effectiveness, and its contraindications, but they often include promotional elements as they compete with other products. This interdiscursive hybridity in the form of mixed genres represents two distinctive spheres of activity (i.e. medical and marketing). Similarly, hybrid generic patterns are typically used in corporate annual disclosure reports as hybrids of reporting and promotional genres (see Bhatia 2010 for a detailed account of corporate annual reports). Another typical example would be the so-called advertorials in newspapers and magazines, appropriating semiotic resources across two different genres: the editorial and the advertisement. Comprehensive analysis of professional communication, therefore, needs to consider and account for all such semiotic resources, including textual, intertextual, genre conventions, and other constraints on professional practice and culture. Interdiscursivity can be viewed as 129

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appropriation of text-external semiotic resources across genre conventions and specific aspects of professional practices, cultures, or identities. Appropriations across texts thus give rise to intertextual relations, whereas appropriations across professional genres, practices, and cultures constitute interdiscursive relations. Writing in the professions, whether in law, business, or media, is essentially an interdiscursive phenomenon, which takes place in socio-pragmatic space (Bhatia 2010) where professional identities and, more specifically, participant relations are negotiated through a dynamic range of different voices to achieve specific professional goals and objectives. One of the reasons for this interdiscursive character of professional writing seems to be the consequence of widespread collaboration within and across specific communities of practice (Ede and Lunsford 1990; Wenger 1998), where collaborative writing is pervasive in contemporary workplaces. In the PR industry, for instance, this kind of collaborative effort involves a variety of clients and PR specialists across specific firms, at one level, and within a specific firm itself, different members of the team are involved in the designing and writing of specific document. This aspect of interdiscursive collaboration in the construction of PR contexts, whether they are company and client meetings, advertisements, press releases, web designs, or proposals, reflects Bakhtin’s (1987) assertion that all texts are essentially heteroglossic in nature. Fairclough (1995), similarly, reiterates that that interdiscursivity highlights the normal heterogeneity of texts in being constituted by combinations of diverse genres and discourses transforming the past or prior texts into the present. Consequently, Bhatia (2010) provides a comprehensive view of interdiscursivity in genre theory, especially in the context of professional genres, viewing it as creative appropriation or manipulation of prior formulations of discursive actions within and across professional practices and cultures to construct new and creative forms of professional genres.

Professional practice As discussed, recent studies have focused increasingly on text-external factors and contextualization which contribute to the construction, interpretation, and analysis of the textual genres intertextually (Foucault 1972) and interdiscursively (Fairclough 1995; Candlin and Maley 1997; Bhatia 2004, 2010, 2017). In professional and institutional contexts, particularly, one needs to integrate textual as well as practice-based contextual analyses to have a comprehensive view of communication. In order to better understand how professionals conduct their day-to-day business, we need to understand how discursive practices are related to professional, organizational, and institutional practices (Schnurr 2013). The focus in discourse analysis, therefore, must be on the description of discursive interactions, distinguishing them from what might be regarded as institutional interactions as well. Discursive interactions represent the actual instances of genres constructed and interpreted by members of professional communities in the process of accomplishing their professional practices, whereas institutional interactions are those that provide the essential background discourses that represent the shared beliefs, professional values, and codes of conduct that all members follow in their everyday business. The analysis of language in production and consumption of knowledge activities within disciplinary contexts needs to focus on disciplinary and/or professional genres that are the ultimate products of the interactions that members of professional communities are involved in and on the spoken and written organizational discourses that they participate in as part of their professional routine. Any analysis of organizational or professional practice needs to consider the related discursive practices, as it is precisely this relationship between discourse and expert behaviour that often constitutes actions linked to displays of professional expertise (Candlin and Candlin 2002; Philips et al. 2004). 130

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Despite the various approaches discourse analysis has developed in different contexts, and for different purposes, these approaches share a concern for the analysis of discursive practices to understand better the disciplinary, institutional, organizational, or professional practices of specialist communities (Compagnone 2015). Critical genre theory is an attempt to integrate many of these concerns in a multi-perspective analytical framework that focuses on professional practice in addition to discursive practice (see Höög and Björkvall 2018; Ge and Wang 2019; Yu and Bondi 2019; Qian 2020). This is especially necessary given the rapid expansion of digital genres of professional communication to explore which researchers have increasingly turned to critical genre theory to account for creative manipulation of professional resources in the pursuit of specific professional goals. For example, Bhatia (2018, forthcoming) focuses on the digital beauty industry to investigate the interdiscursive construction of expertise on YouTube educational tutorials to account for the way YouTubers establish themselves as both engaged and interactive participants of the YouTube community. At the same time, they discursively exploit the boundaries between the expert and lay person by drawing on their discursive competence, disciplinary knowledge, and professional practice. Similarly, Sokół (2022) draws on the notion of interdiscursive performance and ecolinguistics to investigate the interdiscursive practices that lifestyle vloggers engage in to construct their expertise and credibility when performing eco-activism on YouTube vlogs. Feng (2019) explores how social media has transformed the marketization of university communication by analyzing recruitment posts on WeChat in China. He finds, amongst other things, an interdiscursive mix of a wide range of communicative functions, particularly the co-existence of policy discourse and promotional discourse and the use of personalized language and multimodal resources to engage readers’ interest and to build solidarity.

Implications for English for professional communication We have presented in this chapter, the current view of professional communication as an interdisciplinary area of study and application, which may be viewed as an integration not only of two rather distinct approaches to the teaching and learning of English – ESP and business communication studies – but also enriched by multidimensional and multi-perspective analyses of systems of professional genres and practices (Bhatia 2017). We have also tried to point out that advances in the field of genre analysis, particularly the effort to go beyond the textual artefacts to investigate context of various kinds, including intertextuality and interdiscursivity, are crucial to a comprehensive understanding of professional communication. Drawing on critical genre analytical framework, we highlight the following areas of challenge and further work.

Accounting for professional practice Traditional genre analysis has encouraged analysts to focus on idealized and somewhat pure generic forms and, in the process, overlook the realities of the professional world. So it is necessary to understand and account for professional practice rather than just the discursive practice of these professionals. It is important to analyze the discourses often used by specialists but also account for how they exploit such discourses in achieving their everyday professional tasks. The focus should remain on ‘how language participates in the performance of professional tasks, creating environments, identities, social relations’ (Bonini 2010: 485). Professional genres and professional practices are invariably seen as complementing each other, in that they not only influence each other but are often co-constructed, thus making it necessary for the intended users of such genres to interpret them in a much wider socio-pragmatic space 131

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(Bhatia 2004), with particular attention to intertextuality and interdiscursivity, as well as the professional practices they often realize in specific contexts.

Demystifying the interdiscursive nature of professional genres With the use of digital modes of communication in public life, and the more recent increase in the interdisciplinary nature of academic and professional discourse, manipulation of genre conventions by expert members of professional communities has become a common strategy to signal private intentions within the framework of socially shared generic conventions (Bhatia 2010). Appropriations across professional genres, practices, and cultures tend to encourage experts and experienced writers to look for innovative strategies to achieve their individual and professional objectives. In the context of such manipulation of interdiscursive resources by members of professional communities to construct generic hybrids, one of the main concerns of critical genre analysis is to account for such appropriations and point out that these are legitimate appropriations and creative extensions of available linguistic and generic resources, not necessarily flouting conventions. Accounting for such innovative appropriations is crucial for our understanding of professional practice.

Providing evidence-based pedagogical insights for EPC Although genre theory so far has been able to offer significant linguistic insights for the teaching and learning of languages under ESP (Swales 1990; Bhatia 1993), the learners have been constrained in two important ways: firstly, they remain exposed to ideal and pedagogically convenient forms of genre and so have often been surprised by the complex realities of the professional world, and secondly, there has been a significant gap between the perceptions of genre analysts and those of practising professionals. There has considerably less shared interest in each other’s professional objectives and practices; in fact, the two communities often give rise to contestations rather than shared understanding. A good understanding of discursive and professional practices can also help EPC course designers and practitioners to bridge this gap between the academy and professional world.

Understanding professional communication as interdiscursive performance As discussed in the preceding sections, genres are invariably used to give voice to professional practices or actions which need to be integrated with discursive practice to study interdiscursive performance of professionals in their day-to-day activities (Wei et al. 2020). The tendency to focus entirely on textual space, undermining socio-pragmatic space, can prevent analysts from arriving at evidence-based insights about the use of professional discourse to achieve professional objectives. There are two sides to this issue – first, from the point of view of the writer primarily responsible for the discursive construction of the text and, second, from the recipient of the text who is responsible for the uptake. Thus, we need a shift in focus from an exclusive linguistic description of genres towards a more comprehensive and grounded analysis and explanation of the conditions of production and reception of genres and their communicative purposes. Interdiscursive performance thus accounts for not only the discursive and professional practice in interdiscursive contexts but also the recipient’s uptake in professional contexts. Bhatia (2017) sums up some of the key concerns and perspectives in critical genre theory to account for interdiscursive performance in professional contexts. 132

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Figure 10.2 Theory of interdiscursive performance

Finally, to conclude, it may be said that research in areas such as the relationship between discursive activities and professional practices in most disciplinary, professional, and institutional contexts (Bhatia 2006, 2008) is still in its early stages, and a lot more work is needed before we can find more comprehensive and convincing answers to the question that Bhatia (2004: 9) raised – why do most of the professionals from the same disciplinary culture construct, interpret, and use language in specific rhetorical situations more or less the same way?

Related topics genre analysis; institutional discourse

Further reading Bhatia, V. K. (2004) Worlds of Written Discourse: A Genre-Based View, London and New York: Continuum. (It offers a comprehensive genre analytical framework for the study of discursive practices in a variety of different business and disciplinary contexts in the real world.) Bhatia, V. K. (2017) Critical Genre Analysis: Investigating Interdiscursive Performance in Professional Communication, London: Routledge. (It presents the most recent updates on and specification of critical genre theory integrating discursive and professional practices in various professional contexts and demonstrates the analysis and its use in English for professional communication contexts.) Smart, G. (2006) Writing the Economy: Activity, Genre and Technology in the World of Banking, London: Equinox Publishing. (It is an engaging and well-researched analysis of an important banking institution.) Swales, J. M. (1990) Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (It is an excellent exposition to the origin of genre in English for academic purposes. It is a must for anyone interested in the study of genre analysis in applied linguistics.) Swales, J. M. (2004) Research Genres: Explorations and Applications, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (It is very comprehensive and useful book for the teaching and learning of academic English, with particular reference to research writing.) 133

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11 Identity Bonny Norton and Monica Shank Lauwo

Introduction Interest in identity in the field of applied linguistics and language education is best understood in the context of a shift from a predominantly psycholinguistic approach to language learning to include a greater focus on sociological and anthropological dimensions, particularly with reference to sociocultural, post-structural, and critical theories (Norton 2013; Mackey 2015; Preece 2016; Norton and De Costa 2018). Such research suggests that the extent to which a person speaks or is silent has much to do with the extent to which the speaker is valued in any given institution or community (Bourdieu 1991). In this regard, social processes and structures marked by inequities based on such categories as race, gender, class, and sexual orientation may serve to position people in ways that silence and exclude. At the same time, however, people may exercise human agency to resist marginalization, claiming identities of competence and power (Miller 2014). Of central interest to researchers of identity in applied linguistics is that the very articulation of power, identity, and human agency is expressed in and through language. Language is thus more than a system of signs; it is social practice in which experiences are organized and identities negotiated. Identity researchers in applied linguistics are interested in relationships between speakers and the larger social world, with an important focus on language learners and teachers. They examine ways in which affective factors, such as motivation and extroversion, are socially constructed, changing across time and space, and possibly co-existing in contradictory ways within a single individual (Darvin and Norton 2015, 2023). Equity is a central concern, including attention to ways learners and teachers challenge essentialist ideologies (e.g. narrow assumptions about what it means to be ‘woman’ or ‘Muslim’). A commitment to equity is also reflected in identity researchers’ examination of promising practices for supporting learners’ diverse identities and expanding their range of imagined identities across time and space. At the same time, there is acknowledgement that classroom pedagogy alone cannot fully address systemic injustices that result in the marginalization of certain individuals and groups due to specific identity features. Critical perspectives and critical pedagogy thus go hand in hand with identity work, seeking ways to construct more equitable systems in and beyond the classroom,

DOI: 10.4324/9781003082637-13

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including attention to material conditions that give rise to inequities in power and learning opportunities (Block 2017; Morgan 2017). This chapter traces the genesis of research on identity in applied linguistics from the 1970s to the present day, focusing on some of the major theoretical influences on identity research. The main issues include changes to theories of language and theories of the individual, drawing particularly on post-structuralist theory and conceptions of power. Current research focuses on intersectional negotiation of diverse identity dimensions, the theory of investment in language learning and teaching, teacher identity and social change, and language and identity in a digital world. This chapter addresses prominent methods of identity research and then turns to implications of identity research for classroom practice. It concludes with a discussion of future directions for research with respect to translanguaging and new materialism.

Historical perspectives In the 1970s and 1980s, language education scholars interested in identity tended to draw distinctions between social identity and cultural identity. While social identity was seen to reference the relationship between individual language learners and the larger social world, as mediated through institutions, such as families, schools, workplaces, social services, and law courts (e.g. Gumperz 1982), cultural identity referenced membership in a particular ethnic group (such as Japanese or Somali) that shares a common history, a common language, and similar ways of understanding the world (e.g. Valdes 1986). However, as Atkinson (1999) has noted, past theories of cultural identity tended to essentialize and oversimplify identity in problematic ways. In more recent years, the difference between social and cultural identities is seen to be theoretically more fluid, and the intersections between social and cultural identities are considered more significant than their differences. In contemporary research, discussed more fully in this chapter, identity is seen as socioculturally constructed in relations of power that are frequently inequitable. The Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, launched in 2002, as well as other key journals in applied linguistics, ensures that issues of language, identity, and learning remain at the forefront of research in applied linguistics and language education.

Critical issues and topics Changing conceptions of language One of the main issues in applied linguistics research on identity concerns post-Saussurean theories of language, which are associated, amongst others, with the work of Bakhtin (1981), Bourdieu (1991), Hall (1997) and Weedon (1997). These theories build on but are distinct from structuralist theories of language. For structuralists, the linguistic system guarantees the meaning of signs (the word and its meaning) and each linguistic community has its own set of signifying practices that give value to the signs in a language. Post-structuralists have critiqued these theories of language on the grounds that structuralism cannot account for struggles over the diverse social meanings that can be attributed to signs in a given language (Norton and Morgan 2020). The signs /success/, /education/, /time/, for example, can have different meanings for different people within the same linguistic community. While structuralists conceive of signs as having idealized meanings and linguistic communities as being relatively homogeneous and consensual, post-structuralists take the position that the signifying practices of a society are sites of struggle and that linguistic communities are heterogeneous arenas characterized by conflicting claims to truth and power. Thus, language is not conceived of as 138

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a neutral medium of communication but is understood with reference to its social meaning in a frequently inequitable world. In post-structuralist theories of language, there is much interest in the way power is implicated in relationships between individuals, communities, and political entities (McKinney 2017; Norton 2021). Identity researchers often draw on Foucault (1980) and Bourdieu (1991) to better understand how power operates within society, constraining or enabling human action. Foucault (1980) argues, for example, that power is often invisible in that it frequently naturalizes events and practices in ways that come to be seen as ‘normal’ to members of a community. Bourdieu (1991), who is particularly interested in language and symbolic power, notes further that the value ascribed to speech cannot be understood apart from the person who speaks, and the person who speaks cannot be understood apart from larger networks of social relationships. Every time we speak, we are negotiating a sense of self in relation to the larger social world and reorganizing that relationship across time and space. Our race, gender, class, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and other characteristics are all implicated in this negotiation of identity.

Changing conceptions of the individual In the 1970s and 1980s, much research on language learning investigated the personalities, learning styles, motivations, and other unique characteristics of individual learners, and conceived of language learners with reference to relatively fixed and long-term traits. Such research was consistent with humanist conceptions of the individual dominant in Western philosophy, which presupposed that every person – the ‘real me’ – had an essential, unique, fixed, and coherent core. In post-structuralist theory, however, the individual is conceived as diverse, contradictory, dynamic, and changing over historical time and social space (Weedon 1997; Kramsch 2009; Norton 2013). As Weedon (1997) notes, it is through language that a person negotiates a sense of self within and across a range of sites at different points in time, and language contributes to a person’s ability to gain access to powerful social networks. From a language educator’s perspective, the conceptualization of subjectivity as multiple and changing offers opportunity, and indeed responsibility, to support learners to negotiate their identities in ways that maximize their right to speak. While some identity positions may constrain opportunities for learners to speak, read, or write, other identity positions may offer enhanced sets of possibilities for social interaction and human agency. Such post-structuralist theory has great relevance for applied linguistics theory in that it provides insight into the conditions under which language learners speak, read, or write (McNamara 2012; Norton and Morgan 2020). In those contexts in which a language learner is valued and is in a subject position of relative power, the learner will be encouraged to engage in social interaction; in those contexts in which a learner is marginalized and powerless, opportunities for social interaction will be more limited. However, in post-structuralist theory, structural constraints and social conditions do not entirely determine the social trajectories of individuals. Through human agency, language learners who struggle to speak from an identity position of relative powerlessness may be able to reframe their relationship with their interlocutors and claim alternative, more powerful identities from which to speak, thereby enhancing language learning (Miller 2014).

Current contributions and research As recent identity research suggests, identity needs to be interrogated in the face of globalization, including attention to ways that experiences of transnationalism shape language practices, investments, and identities. Processes relating to globalization and transnationalism have 139

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led to increasing multilingualism in schools and society and the production of what Higgins (2015) has called ‘millennium identities’, which index the diverse and complex mechanisms that produce linguistic and cultural hybridity in many 21st-century contexts. At the same time, the forces of neoliberalism (see Block et al. 2012; Heller and McElhinny 2017), which entail deregulated markets, heightened individualism, marketization of activities and institutions, and the pursuit of profit, have had concomitant effects on the identities of language learners and teachers. Dynamics relating to both globalization and neoliberalism, as well as colonialism and post-coloniality, have propelled English to a status of unparalleled prestige, with significant implications for identity negotiation amidst processes of learning, teaching, and speaking English, the subject of much identity research. In this changing global landscape, research on intersectionality, investment, language teacher identity, and digital technology is vibrant.

Intersectionality and diverse identity dimensions While some identity research focuses primarily on a particular dimension of identity, such as gender, race, ethnicity, religion, or social class, most identity researchers agree that any analysis is incomplete without paying heed to ‘the necessarily intersectional nature of identity’ (Block and Corona 2016: 507). With origins in Black feminism (e.g. Crenshaw 1989; Hill-Collins and Bilge 2015), intersectionality acknowledges that different identity dimensions cannot be understood in isolation from each other. As Crenshaw (1989: 140) asserts, ‘because the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which Black women are subordinated’. Current applied linguistics research on intersectional dimensions of race, social class, and sexual orientation is particularly dynamic. With regard to issues of race, Motha’s (2014) work reminds us that the teaching of English remains contested territory, inscribed by race. Examining the anti-racist work of four English as a Second Language (ESL) teachers, Motha (2014) unpacks the myth of race neutrality in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) and reveals how ideologies of native-speakerism, ‘standard’ language, and empire perpetuate racial hierarchies in American public schools. In a study examining intersections of race, gender, and sexuality, Appleby (2014) found that academic identities of white Western men teaching English in higher education in Japan erased their embodiment of race, gender, and sexuality, making invisible idealized white Western masculinities that may inadvertently reproduce forms of racialization, sexism, and patriarchy. Focusing on race in Second Language Acquisition (SLA), Anya (2017) examined how Blackness shaped African American study abroad students’ intersectional identity negotiation, intercultural experiences, and investments in learning Portuguese in Afro-Brazilian communities. Investigating complexities of race in post-apartheid South Africa, Kerfoot and Bello-Nonjengele (2016) demonstrated how South African children’s fluid and strategic linguistic practices deconstructed racial categories and denaturalized previously enforced relationships between specific linguistic forms and certain racial and ethnic categories. Future work on race and its intersection with other identity dimensions will continue to address the long-standing native- and non-native-speaker distinction, which continues to be resilient in mainstream second language identity research (Jain et al. 2021). The role of social class in language learning and teaching is gaining increasing attention in identity research, supported by Block’s (2014) seminal contribution. Most work on social class in applied linguistics draws on Bourdieusian conceptualizations of class, understanding social class to be built on Bourdieu’s (1991) constructs of capital, habitus, and field. A special issue on social class, edited by Kanno and Vandrick (2014), in the Journal of Language, 140

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Identity, and Education, demonstrated the urgency of examining materially mediated sources of inequality in language education. Prominent themes in social class work include transnationalism, English learning, and investment. While recognizing that the emergence of neoliberal post-industrial economic structures may render traditional notions of ‘middle class’ and ‘working class’ defunct (Savage et al. 2013), Darvin and Norton (2014) argue that class differences continue to impinge on the life trajectories of migrants, in visible and invisible ways. They draw on research with migrant learners in Canada to illustrate how migrants operate with a transnational habitus, continually negotiating their class positions. Working with more privileged learners, Shin (2014) examined how Korean secondary school students studying abroad in Toronto responded to ‘linguistic and racial stigmatization and downward social mobility’ (Shin 2014: 101) by performing elite transnational Korean identities. Ironically, by engaging in upper class consumption of Korean language and culture in Toronto, these Korean students constrained their acquisition of English linguistic capital, the class-inflected objective of their migration. With Nelson’s (2009) ground-breaking work on LGBTQ+ learners paving the way, sexual orientation is gaining prominence in identity research in applied linguistics (Gray and Cooke 2019). For example, through critical reflection on past teaching experiences, Rhodes (2019) developed strategies to positively address sexual identity in the adult English language classroom, while Paiz (2019) presented an approach for the queering of English language teaching, including an increased emphasis on LGBTQ+ inclusivity in teacher preparation and curricular materials. In the context of Japanese SL/FL classrooms, Moore (2019) investigated interpersonal factors shaping queer L2 learners’ decisions surrounding identity management, expanding his analysis in Moore (2023), which highlights ways that institutional policies and practices impact queer learners’ well-being. Future work will continue investigating how queer inquiry can be more fruitfully applied in language education, teacher education, and materials development.

Identity and investment The sociological construct of investment, conceptualized by Norton in the mid-1990s (Norton Peirce 1995; Norton 2013) and developed more fully with Darvin (Darvin and Norton 2015, 2023), continues to impact applied linguistics research across global sites (e.g. Barkhuizen 2016; Bemporad 2016; Cole et al. 2016; Anya 2017; Donehue 2017; Jiang et al. 2020; Clément and Norton 2021). Conceptualized as a complement to the psychological construct of motivation (Dörnyei and Ushioda 2009), investment research has found that a learner may be a highly motivated language learner but may nevertheless have little investment in the language practices of a given classroom or community, if it is, for example, racist, sexist, elitist, or homophobic. Despite being highly motivated, a learner can be excluded from the language practices of a classroom or perhaps resist certain classroom practices, and in time be positioned as a ‘poor’ or unmotivated language learner. To capture a changing social order characterized by technological innovation, mobility, and unpredictability (Blommaert 2013), Darvin and Norton (2015, 2023) have developed an expanded model of investment, which occurs at the intersection of identity, capital, and ideology. (See Figure 11.1.) Through this critical lens, researchers and practitioners can examine more systematically how microstructures of power in communicative events are indexical of larger ideological structures. By providing a multilayered and multidirectional approach, the model demonstrates how power circulates in society and constructs modes of inclusion and exclusion through and beyond language. 141

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Figure 11.1 Darvin and Norton’s model of investment (reprinted from ‘Identity and a Model of Investment in Applied Linguistics’, Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 35, p. 42; copyright 2015 by Cambridge University Press; reprinted with permission)

Since its inception, the model of investment has been used as a heuristic to frame diverse research studies of both language learners and teachers. For example, in a study of two grade 3 French immersion classrooms in Quebec, Canada, Ballinger (2017) drew on the model to examine the extent to which learners are invested in languages of instruction, French and English. The researcher drew links between the more equitable social status of the two languages and the use of these languages in peer interaction. In a New Zealand context, Barkhuizen (2016) examined how language teacher identities are constructed in and through narrative, drawing on the investment model as a theoretical lens. Recognizing that ‘investment indexes issues of identity and imagined futures’ (Darvin and Norton 2015: 39), Barkhuizen analyzed the lived stories of one teacher, Sela, as they unfolded across personal, institutional, and ideological contexts. In a study of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) instructors in South Korea, Gearing and Roger (2018) used the model to analyze to what extent teachers were invested in learning and using the Korean language. Their study showed how their investment was shaped by perceived inequities of power between themselves and local communities of practice, their attempts to negotiate membership into these communities, and the ways they were positioned as native English speakers. As demonstrated in the Douglas Fir Model of SLA (Douglas Fir Group 2016), investment has become foundational in applied linguistics research, with much potential for interdisciplinary links (Clément and Norton 2021), and continues to have much potential for future research in the field (De Costa and Norton 2016).

Language teacher identity Language teacher identity (LTI) has become an increasingly vibrant site of identity research over the past two decades, as attested to by a mushrooming number of edited volumes and journal special issues devoted to this area in recent years (e.g. Cheung et al. 2015; Varghese 142

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et al. 2016; Barkhuizen 2017, 2021; De Costa and Norton 2017; Yazan and Lindahl 2020). There is growing recognition of the centrality of identity to language teaching and language teacher education, with De Costa and Norton (2017: 7) asserting that ‘language teaching is identity work’ and Kanno and Stuart (2011: 249) naming the development of teacher identity as ‘the central project in which novice L2 teachers are involved’. A significant theme in language teacher identity work is the role of native-speakerist ideologies in the experiences of non-native-English-speaking (NNES) TESOL teachers, including the intersections of identities related to NNES, race, and nationality (Aneja 2016; Canagarajah 2017; Wolff and De Costa 2017; Swearingen 2019). As Norton (2017: 81) states, ‘language teacher identity indexes both social structure and human agency’. Indeed, much language teacher identity literature emphasizes the agency of teachers in improving student learning and working towards equity and transformation (e.g. Miller et al. 2017). Morgan (2017: 206) understands teacher identity as ‘a key source of agency for social change’, while Higgins (2017: 39) positions language teacher identity research ‘as a form of activism’. At the same time, there is recognition that language teacher identities are negotiated in complex relationships with the micro, meso, and macro social structures and power relations (Douglas Fir Group 2016; De Costa and Norton 2017). Block (2017: 35) thus reminds us that teachers do not have ‘unfettered agency’ and argues that ‘LTIs are changing as the political economy that envelops them changes, and this reality needs to be taken on in future LTI research’. Amidst recognition that ‘becoming a teacher is nothing short of identity transformation’ (Kanno and Stuart 2011: 239), there are calls to place language teacher identity development at the centre of language teacher education (e.g. Kanno and Stuart 2011; Varghese et al. 2016; Shank Lauwo and Norton, in press). In response, Fairley (2020) conceptualized a model of LTI-centred language teacher education that is competencies-based and focused on the development of LTI that is transformative, agentive, and advocacy-oriented. While most teacher education-oriented LTI studies have focused on preservice TESOL teachers, Shank Lauwo et al. (2022) examined LTI in elementary preservice teacher education in Canada, finding race and language learning histories to impact the equity-oriented approaches teachers bring to plurilingual classrooms. Most recently, Barkhuizen (2021) has extended identity work in teacher education to focus on language teacher educators, examining how language teacher educators negotiate and are ascribed various identities in professional contexts and offering 40 research questions pointing to robust future directions for language teacher educator identity research.

Identity in the digital world The affordances of digital technology have been investigated by a number of scholars interested in identity and language learning, and this trend will likely strengthen in future years (Lam and Warriner 2012; Darvin 2016). Thorne et al. (2015) have found that digital interaction offers particular affordances in the construction of identities of competence. In the context of digital storytelling, Johnson and Kendrick (2017) demonstrated how affordances of the multiple modes of digital technology supported refugee-background youth to express difficult knowledge and construct identities of accomplishment, overcoming language barriers to utilize rich communicative repertoires. Examining social class dimensions of digital literacy, Darvin (2018) demonstrated how material conditions of adolescents of contrasting class positions help produce contrasting practices and dispositions towards digital technology, with significant implications for their respective accumulation of cultural and social capital. 143

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However, as informative as this work has been, Prinsloo (2020) argues that much of the digital research on language education has focused on research in wealthier regions of the world and that there is a great need for research in poorly resourced communities to impact global debates on new technologies, identity, and language learning. Conceptualizing digital media as placed resources operating differently in different contexts, Lemphane and Prinsloo (2014) found that the contrasting digital practices of urban township children and suburban middle-class children in South Africa represent situated sociopolitical norms reflecting their class differences, suggesting that digital media may actually widen class-based inequalities. In the context of an after-school journalism club in Kenya, Kendrick et al. (2019) found that social practices surrounding digital technology enabled girls to claim identities of power, as they used digital technology to develop practices and identities as activists addressing injustices in Kenyan society. In a Ugandan context, Stranger-Johannessen and Norton (2017) examined how teachers exercise their agency by using one particular resource, the African Storybook initiative, an online digital platform with children’s stories. The model of investment (Darvin and Norton 2015) was used analytically to understand teachers’ investments in the African Storybook, its impact on their teaching, and their changing identities.

Research methods Post-structuralism’s understanding of identity as a negotiated social practice, always embedded within networks of power, has methodological implications. Researchers adopting a post-structuralist lens to investigate the intersections of language and identity pay particular reflexive attention to the entanglement of their own subjectivities in local contexts and the research process in general (Norton and Early 2011; Moore 2016; Prior 2016). Researchers’ own multiple and shifting identities shape the particular research questions they ask, the methods used to answer them, and the kinds of stories participants share with them. In Moore’s (2016) study of a community English class for queer learners in Japan, he enhances his thematic analysis by foregrounding his position as one of the volunteer teachers of the class, critically exploring the tensions emerging from competing interpellations of queer identities by the teachers and students. Innovative work by Prior (2016) combines conversation analysis with a discursive constructionist approach to investigate how he, as the researcher, and his participants – many of whom identified outside of heterosexuality – discursively coconstructed and co-managed emotions as social actions through their talk-in-interaction. In addition to a consideration of researcher identity, Norton and De Costa (2018) have identified a number of methodologies that have been helpful in identity research, providing a comprehensive review of narrative inquiry, conversation analysis, and linguistic ethnography in identity research.

Recommendations for practice The relevance of identity research for classroom teaching is of much interest to language educators in diverse regions of the world. By addressing identity in the language classroom, teachers are able to design learning activities that recognize the rich diversity of learners and affirm the cultural, linguistic, and semiotic knowledge that they bring to class. Central questions teachers need to ask concern the conditions under which learners will speak, which identity positions offer greater opportunities for access to powerful networks, and how to best support the collaborative creation of power (Cummins and Early 2011). Learners who may be marginalized by virtue of gender, race, ethnicity, or social class can be supported to reframe 144

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their relationships with the social world in ways that amplify their agency and heighten their investment in learning and knowledge production. Many identity scholars point to ways in which multilingual and multimodal pedagogies, often in consort, can support identity affirmation and negotiation by making visible and building on learners’ diverse linguistic and semiotic repertoires. Shank Lauwo (2018), for example, examined how translanguaging pedagogies, including Tanzanian children’s authorship of trilingual multimodal stories and identity texts, supported learners to claim agency as language experts, co-teachers, and knowledge producers while supporting language learning and development of critical literacies. Focusing on refugee-background youth’s multimodal literacy practices, Kennedy et al. (2019) examined how emergent multilinguals in the United States used multimodal journaling and poetry writing to author unique identities that resisted static identity categories while negotiating bicultural Chin (Burmese) American identities. Drawing on a range of literacy and multimodality studies in East Africa and Canada, Kendrick (2016) points to how engaging with multiple modes, such as imaginative play, drawing, and multimodal role-play, provides opportunities to rehearse and try on an expanded range of identities. In a practitioner-oriented volume on teaching English Language Learners (ELLs) through a multilingual lens, Cummins and Early (2015) offer concrete strategies for how to centre learners’ multilingual and multimodal competencies, funds of knowledge, and lived experiences in order to maximize identity affirmation and empowerment. In recent years, digital storytelling has become a popular identity text project encouraging learners to claim multimodal and often multilingual authorial agency (Stranger-Johannessen and Norton 2017). Dagenais et al. (2017), for example, detail how teachers used ScribJab, a digital platform for composing multilingual, multimodal stories, to validate students’ diverse linguistic repertoires, arguing that assessment of multilingual, multimodal compositions is essential for them to be taken seriously as ‘real school’. With evidence from a university-based EFL classroom in China, Jiang et al. (2020) demonstrated how digital storytelling can support teachers’ identity negotiation and investment. Significantly, as Hare et al. (2017) detail, some Indigenous communities are embracing digital storytelling as a means of revitalizing their languages and cultures, and digital storytelling is bolstering efforts to work towards reconciliation and to centre Indigenous stories and perspectives in imaginations of Canada’s national identity.

Future directions Identity and translanguaging Amidst the recent flurry of attention to translanguaging in applied linguistics (Li 2018), the intersection of identity and translanguaging is emerging as a generative area of inquiry (see Shank Lauwo and Norton 2023). Translanguaging, as a bottom-up counter-hegemonic practice, can productively disrupt limiting and prescriptive identity categories and create space for hybridity, transformation, and the emergence of new identity possibilities. Destabilizing oneto-one equations of language and identity, translanguaging enables people to claim a ‘hybrid language space to identify and ethnify – choosing who they want to become beyond traditional linguistic and exact ethnic affiliations (Nkadimeng and Makalela 2015: 7). Translanguaging offers fertile ground for the examination of ‘third space’ identity negotiation (Guzula et al. 2016; Li 2018), polyphonic identities (Shank Lauwo 2018), investment (Shank Lauwo 2021), and translation (Doherty et al. 2022). Dynamics relating to increasing transnationalism, complexity, and the ubiquitous nature of digital technology will render the intersections of translanguaging and identity an increasingly vibrant area of research in applied linguistics in years to come. 145

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Identity and new materialism While post-structuralist theories provide insight into identity as a site of struggle across time and place, there is a growing body of research that seeks to better understand the ways in which the material world is entangled with the human world and how bodies and objects interact in complex and unpredictable ways. Applied linguistics scholars such as Toohey (2018), Pennycook (2018), Dagenais (2020), and Canagarajah (2018) draw on the work of Barad (2007) and other post-humanist scholars to redefine identity not only in terms of social activity but also in relation to the socio-material world. As Dagenais (2020: 558) notes, ‘What distinguishes theories of the social from theories of the socio-material, however, is that in the former material processes are seen as a backdrop to human activity, whereas in the latter they are viewed as central in shaping phenomena’ (Canagarajah 2018). Future research on identity that adopts a socio-material lens will impact the theoretical landscape of applied linguistics in exciting ways, particularly given the increasing importance of digital tools in our multilingual and multimodal world.

Related topics psychology of language learning; multilingualism; gender and sexuality; language and race; posthumanism and applied linguistics; languaging and translanguaging

Further reading Anya, U. (2017) Racialized Identities in Second Language Learning: Speaking Blackness in Brazil, New York: Routledge. (This award-winning book examines how Blackness has shaped African American study abroad students’ intersectional identity negotiation. It focuses on students’ intercultural experiences and investments in learning Portuguese in Afro-Brazilian communities.) Barkhuizen, G. (ed.) (2017) Reflections on Language Teacher Identity Research, New York: Routledge. (This highly readable collection of reflections on language teacher identity presents key ideas, theories, and methodologies about language teacher identity in a succinct and engaging style.) Darvin, R. and Norton, B. (2015) ‘Identity and a model of investment in applied linguistics’, Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 35: 36–56. (This award-winning article presents an expanded model of investment, occurring at the intersection of identity, capital, and ideology. It applies the model to research in the digital era.) Norton, B. (2013) Identity and Language Learning: Extending the Conversation, 2nd ed., Bristol: Multilingual Matters. (In this highly cited second edition, Norton develops her construct of identity as multiple, a site of struggle, and subject to change across time and space. An afterword by Claire Kramsch addresses Norton’s impact on the field with respect to the three influential concepts of identity, investment, and imagined communities.) Preece, S. (ed.) (2016) The Routledge Handbook of Language and Identity, Oxon: Routledge. (This 37-chapter volume provides a comprehensive and highly readable overview of research on language and identity in the field of language education and applied linguistics. Contributors are leading researchers from diverse regions of the world.)

References Aneja, G. A. (2016) ‘(Non)native speakered: Rethinking (non)nativeness and teacher identity in TESOL teacher education’, TESOL Quarterly, 50: 572–596. Anya, U. (2017) Racialized Identities in Second Language Learning: Speaking Blackness in Brazil, New York: Routledge. Appleby, R. (2014) ‘White Western male teachers constructing academic identities in Japanese higher education’, Gender and Education, 26(7): 776–793. 146

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Atkinson, D. (1999) ‘TESOL and culture’, TESOL Quarterly, 33(4): 625–654. Bakhtin, M. (1981) The Dialogic Imagination, Austin: University of Texas Press. Ballinger, S. (2017) ‘Examining peer language use and investment in a distinct North American immersion context’, International Multilingual Research Journal, 11(3): 184–198. Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Durham: Duke University Press. Barkhuizen, G. (2016) ‘A short story approach to analyzing teacher (imagined) identities over time’, TESOL Quarterly, 50: 655–683. Barkhuizen, G. (ed.) (2017) Reflections on Language Teacher Identity Research, New York: Routledge. Barkhuizen, G. (2021) Language Teacher Educator Identity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bemporad, C. (2016) ‘Language investment, une notion majeure pour saisir les dynamiques sociales de l’appropriation langagi’ere’ [Language investment, a major construct for understanding social dynamics in language learning], Langage et Société, 157(3): 39–55. Block, D. (2014) Social Class in Applied Linguistics, London: Routledge. Block, D. (2017) ‘Journey to the enter of language teacher identity’, in G. Barkhuizen (ed.), Reflections on Language Teacher Identity Research, New York: Routledge, pp. 31–36. Block, D. and Corona, V. (2016) ‘Intersectionality in language and identity research’, in S. Preece (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Language and Identity, London: Routledge, pp. 507–522. Block, D., Gray, J. and Holborow, M. (2012) Neoliberalism and Applied Linguistics, London: Routledge. Blommaert, J. (2013) Ethnography, Superdiversity and Linguistic Landscapes: Chronicles of Complexity, Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Bourdieu, P. (1991) Language and Symbolic Power (edited by J. B. Thompson; translated by G. Raymond and M. Adamson), Cambridge: Polity Press. Canagarajah, S. (2017) ‘Multilingual identity in teaching multilingual writing’, in G. Barkhuizen (ed.), Reflections on Language Teacher Identity Research, New York: Routledge, pp. 67–73. Canagarajah, S. (2018) ‘Materializing “competence”: Perspectives from international STEM scholars’, The Modern Language Journal, 102(2): 268–291. Cheung, Y. L., Said, S. B. and Park, E. (eds.) (2015) Advances and Current Trends in Language Teacher Identity Research, New York: Routledge/Taylor & Francis. Clément, R. and Norton, B. (2021) ‘Ethnolinguistic vitality, identity and power: Investment in SLA’, Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 40(1): 154–171. Cole, M., David, S. and Jiménez, R. T. (2016) ‘Collaborative translation: Negotiating student investment in culturally responsive pedagogy’, Language Arts, 93(6): 430–443. Crenshaw, K. (1989) ‘Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A Black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory, and antiracist politics’ [Online], University of Chicago Legal Forum, pp. 139–167. http://philpapers.org/rec/CREDTI Cummins, J. and Early, M. (eds.) (2011) Identity Texts: The Collaborative Creation of Power in Multilingual Schools, Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books. Cummins, J. and Early, M. (2015) Big Ideas for Expanding Minds: Teaching English Language Learners across the Curriculum, Don Mills: Pearson Canada. Dagenais, D. (2020) ‘Identities and language teaching in classrooms’, in C. A. Chapelle (ed.), The Concise Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics, Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, pp. 557–561. Dagenais, D., Toohey, K., Fox, A. B. and Singh, A. (2017) ‘Multilingual and multimodal composition at school: ScribJab in action’, Language and Education, 31(3): 263–282. Darvin, R. (2016) ‘Language and identity in the digital age’, in S. Preece (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Language and Identity, Oxon: Routledge, pp. 523–540. Darvin, R. (2018) ‘Social class and the unequal digital literacies of youth’, Language and Literacy, 20(3): 26–45. Darvin, R. and Norton, B. (2014) ‘Social class, identity, and migrant students’, Journal of Language, Identity & Education, 13(2): 111–117. Darvin, R. and Norton, B. (2015) ‘Identity and a model of investment in applied linguistics’, Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 35: 36–56. Darvin, R. and Norton, B. (2023) ‘Investment and motivation in language learning: What’s the difference?’, Language Teaching, 56: 29–40. De Costa, P. I. and Norton, B. (2016) ‘Identity research on language learning and teaching: Research agendas for the future’, in S. Preece (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Language and Identity, Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 586–601. 147

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De Costa, P. I. and Norton, B. (Guest eds.) (2017) Transdisciplinarity and language teacher identity [Special Issue], Modern Language Journal, 101(S1). Doherty, L., Norton, B. and Stranger-Johannessen, E. (2022) ‘Translation, identity, and translanguaging: Perspectives from a global literacy initiative’, in W. Ayers-Bennett and L. Fisher (eds.), Multilingualism and Identity: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 201–220. Donehue, T. E. (2017) ‘Displacement identity in transit: A Nauru case study’, Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 40(3): 218–246. Dörnyei, Z. and Ushioda, E. (eds.) (2009) Motivation, Language Identity and the L2 Self, Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Douglas Fir Group (2016) ‘A transdisciplinary framework for SLA in a multilingual world’, Modern Language Journal, 100: 19–47. Fairley, M. J. (2020) ‘Conceptualizing language teacher education centered on language teacher identity development: A competencies-based approach and practical applications’, TESOL Quarterly, 54: 1037–1064. Foucault, M. (1980) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977 (translated by C. Gordon), New York: Pantheon Books. Gearing, N. and Roger, P. (2018) ‘“I’m never going to be part of it”: Identity, investment and learning Korean’, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 39(2): 155–168. Gray, J. and Cooke, M. (2019) ‘Queering ESOL: Sexual citizenship in ESOL classrooms’, in M. Cooke and R. Peutrell (eds.), Brokering Britain, Educating Citizens: Exploring ESOL and Citizenship, Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Gumperz, J. (1982) Language and Social Identity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Guzula, X., McKinney, C. and Tyler, R. (2016) ‘Languaging-for-learning: Legitimising translanguaging and enabling multimodal practices in third spaces’, Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, 34(3): 211–226. Hall, S. (1997) Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, London: Sage. Hare, J., Darvin, R., Doherty, L., Early, M., Filipenko, M., Norton, B., Soni, D. and Stranger-Johannessen, E. (2017) ‘Digital storytelling and reconciliation’, in P. Tortell, M. Young and P. Nemetz (eds.), Reflections of Canada: Illuminating Our Opportunities and Challenges at 150+ Years, Vancouver: UBC Peter Wall Institute, pp. 200–205. Heller, M. and McElhinny, B. (2017) Language, Capitalism, Colonialism: Toward a Critical History, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Higgins, C. (2015) ‘Intersecting scapes and new millennium identities in language learning’, Language Teaching, 48: 373–389. Higgins, C. (2017) ‘Towards sociolinguistically informed language teacher identities’, in G. Barkhuizen (ed.), Reflections on Language Teacher Identity Research, New York: Routledge, pp. 37–42. Hill-Collins, P. and Bilge, S. (2015) Intersectionality, London: Polity Press. Jain, R., Yazan, B. and Canagarajah, S. (2021) Transnational Identities and Practices in English Language Teaching: Critical Inquiries from Diverse Practitioners, Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Jiang, L., Yu, S. and Zhao, Y. (2020) ‘An EFL teacher’s investment in digital multimodal composing’, ELT Journal, 74(3): 297–306. Johnson, L. and Kendrick, M. (2017) ‘“Impossible is nothing”: Expressing difficult knowledge through digital storytelling’, Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 60(6): 667–675. Kanno, Y. and Stuart, C. (2011) ‘The development of L2 teacher identity: Longitudinal case studies’, Modern Language Journal, 95: 236–252. Kanno, Y. and Vandrick, S. (Guest eds.) (2014) Social class in language learning and teaching. [Special Issue], Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, 13(2). Kendrick, M. (2016) Literacy and Multimodality across Global Sites, New York: Routledge. Kendrick, M., Early, M. and Chemjor, W. (2019) ‘Designing multimodal texts in a girls’ afterschool journalism club in rural Kenya’, Language and Education, 33(2): 123–140. Kennedy, L., Oviatt, R. and De Costa, P. (2019) ‘Refugee youth’s identity expressions and multimodal literacy practices in a third space’, Journal of Research in Childhood Education, 33(1): 56–70. Kerfoot, C. and Bello-Nonjengele, B. O. (2016) ‘Game changers? Multilingual learners in a Cape Town primary school’, Applied Linguistics, 37(4): 451–473. Kramsch, C. (2009) The Multilingual Subject, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lam, E. and Warriner, D. (2012) ‘Transnationalism and literacy: Investigating the mobility of people, languages, texts, and practices in contexts of migration’, Reading Research Quarterly, 47(2): 191–215. 148

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Lemphane, P. and Prinsloo, M. (2014) ‘Children’s digital literacy practices in unequal South African settings’, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 35(7): 738–753. Li, W. (2018) ‘Translanguaging as a practical theory of language’, Applied Linguistics, 39(1): 9–30. Mackey, A. (ed.) (2015) ‘Identity in applied linguistics’, Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 35. McKinney, C. (2017) Language and Power in Post-Colonial Schooling: Ideologies in Practice, New York: Routledge. McNamara, T. (ed.) (2012) ‘Poststructuralism and its challenges for applied linguistics’, Applied Linguistics, 33(5). Miller, E. R. (2014) The Language of Adult Immigrants: Agency in the Making, Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Miller, E. R., Morgan, B. and Medina, A. L. (2017) ‘Exploring language teacher identity work as ethical self-formation’, Modern Language Journal, 101(S1): 91–105. Moore, A. R. (2016) ‘Inclusion and exclusion: A case study of an English class for LGBT learners’, TESOL Quarterly, 50(1): 86–108. Moore, A. R. (2019) ‘Interpersonal factors affecting queer second or foreign language learners’ identity management in class’, The Modern Language Journal, 103(2): 428–442. Moore, A. R. (2023) ‘[It] changed everything”: The effect of shifting social structures on queer L2 learners’ identity management’, Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, 22(3): 262–278. https://doi. org/10.1080/15348458.2021.1874383 Morgan, B. (2017) ‘Language teacher identity as critical social practice’, in G. Barkhuizen (ed.), Reflections on language teacher identity research, New York: Routledge, pp. 203–209. Motha, S. (2014) Race, Empire, and English Language Teaching: Creating Responsible and Ethical AntiRacist Practice, New York: Teachers College. Nelson, C. D. (2009) Sexual Identities in English Language Education: Classroom Conversations, New York: Routledge. Nkadimeng, S. and Makalela, L. (2015) ‘Identity negotiation in a super-diverse community: The fuzzy languaging logic of high school students in Soweto’, International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 234: 7–26. Norton, B. (2013) Identity and Language Learning: Extending the Conversation, Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Norton, B. (2017) ‘Learner investment and language teacher identity’, in G. Barkhuizen (ed.), Reflections on Language Teacher Identity Research, New York: Routledge, pp. 80–86. Norton, B. (2021) ‘Poststructuralist research on language, gender, and sexuality’, in J. Angouri and J. Baker (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Language, Gender and Sexuality, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 399–407. Norton, B. and De Costa, P. (2018) ‘Research tasks on identity in language learning and teaching’, Language Teaching, 51(1): 90–112. Norton, B. and Early, M. (2011) ‘Researcher identity, narrative inquiry, and language teaching research’, TESOL Quarterly, 45: 415–439. Norton, B. and Morgan, B. (2020) ‘Poststructuralism’, in C. Chapelle (ed.), The Concise Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics, Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, pp. 901–907. Norton Peirce, B. (1995) ‘Social identity, investment, and language learning’, TESOL Quarterly, 29(1): 9–31. Paiz, J. M. (2019) ‘Queering practice: LGBTQ+ diversity and inclusion in English language teaching’, Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, 18: 266–275. Pennycook, A. (2018) Posthumanist Applied Linguistics, Oxon and New York: Routledge. Preece, S. (ed.) (2016) The Routledge Handbook of Language and Identity, London: Routledge. Prinsloo, M. (2020) ‘Children’s divergent practices and access to digital media in home, school and neighbourhood communities’, in O. Erstad, R. Flewitt, B. Kümmerling-Meibauer and Í. S. Pires Pereira (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Digital Literacies in Early Childhood, New York: Routledge, pp. 146–157. Prior, M. (2016) Emotion and Discourse in L2 Narrative Research, Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Rhodes, C. M. (2019) ‘A practical guide to queering the adult English language classroom’, Adult Learning, 30(4): 160–166. Savage, M., Devine, F., Cunningham, N., Taylor, M., Li, Y., Hjellbrekke, J., et al. (2013) ‘A new model of social class?: Findings from the BBC’s Great British Class Survey experiment’, Sociology, 47(2): 219–250. Shank Lauwo, M. (2018) ‘Power, literacy engagement, and polyphonic identities: Translanguaging in a Tanzanian community library’, Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, 36(2): 133–146. 149

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Shank Lauwo, M. (2021) ‘Translanguaging, multimodality, and authorship: Cultivating creativity and critical literacies through multilingual education in Tanzania’, in E. Erling, J. Clegg, C. M. Rubagumya and C. Reilly (eds.), Multilingual Learning and Language Supportive Pedagogies in Sub-Saharan Africa, New York: Routledge. Shank Lauwo, M., Accurso, K. and Rajagopal, H. (2022) ‘Plurilingualism, equity, and preservice teacher identity: Centring [linguistic] diversity in teacher education’, TESL Canada Journal, 38(2): 113–139. Shank Lauwo, M. and Norton, B. (2023) ‘Translanguaging and identity across global sites’, in R. Tierney, F. Rizvi, K. Ercikan and G. Smith (eds.), International Encyclopedia of Education, 4th ed., Amsterdam: Elsevier, pp. 148–158. Shank Lauwo, M. and Norton, B. (in press) ‘Identity, language learning, and teacher education’, in C. Chapelle (ed.), Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics, 2nd ed., Hoboken: Wiley. Shin, H. (2014) ‘Social class, habitus, and language learning: The case of Korean early study-abroad students’, Journal of Language, Identity & Education, 13(2): 99–103. Stranger-Johannessen, E. and Norton, B. (2017) ‘The African Storybook and language teacher identity in digital times’, Modern Language Journal, 101(S1): 45–60. Swearingen,  A.  J.  (2019)  ‘Nonnative‐English‐speaking  teacher  candidates’  language  teacher  identity  development in graduate TESOL preparation programs: A review of the literature’, TESOL Journal: 1–15. Thorne, S. L., Sauro, S. and Smith, B. (2015) ‘Technologies, identities, and expressive activity’, Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 35: 215–233. Toohey, K. (2018) Learning English at School: Identity, Socio-Material Relations, and Classroom Practice, Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Valdes, J. M. (1986) Culture Bound: Bridging the Cultural Gap in Language Teaching, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Varghese, M. M., Motha, S., Trent, J., Park, G. and Reeves, J. (eds.) (2016) ‘Language teacher identity in multilingual settings’, TESOL Quarterly, 50. Weedon, C. (1997) Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory, 2nd ed., Oxford: Blackwell. Wolff, D. and De Costa, P. (2017) ‘Expanding the language teacher identity landscape: An investigation of the emotions and strategies of a NNEST’, Modern Language Journal, 101(S1): 76–90. Yazan, B. and Lindahl, K. (2020) Language Teacher Identity in TESOL, New York: Routledge.

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12 Gender and sexuality Helen Sauntson

Introduction Language, gender, and sexuality emerged as a field of study within applied linguistics in the 1970s and, since then, has grown to become a popular and politically relevant area of study and research. In its broadest terms, the field highlights the role of language in understanding issues, identities, relationships, and debates relating to genders and sexualities. Whilst early work in the field tended to focus on identifying and describing differential linguistic behaviour by women and men, contemporary research now focuses more on the ideologies which underlie notions of gender and sexual difference, where they come from, and why they still persist. They also question the very existence of any of the ‘differences’ identified in earlier research or whether the research itself was designed in such a way that it was instrumental in creating ideologies of language and gender difference. Whilst scholars such as Sunderland (2014) and Freed (2014) acknowledge that there are, undoubtedly, still many structural inequalities around gender and sexuality in most societies, they importantly link inequality and difference to linguistic representation rather than linguistic behaviour. For this reason, they argue that it is still valuable and important to research difference but only in terms of represented difference, and it is this principle which has become a characteristic of the field at the time of writing (and explained further in the sections which follow). For example, it is now considered less useful to ask about how men and women talk (characterized by early work in the field), but more useful to investigate how men and women (and other genders) get represented across texts and contexts (characteristic of contemporary research). The main questions in current language, gender, and sexuality research, then, tend to focus on examining why and how ideologies about gender and sexuality get embedded in language in different text types and contexts.

Historical perspectives In language-focused research on gender, it is well-documented that early work in the field was historically characterized by the theoretical approaches of ‘deficit’, ‘dominance’, and ‘difference’ more or less consecutively. As stated in the introduction, these early theoretical DOI: 10.4324/9781003082637-14

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approaches to language and gender (sexuality did not appear until later) tended to focus on identifying ‘gender differences’ in language – for example, how women and men talk differently. Regardless of some differing interpretations of language data, most early gender and language research (up to the 1970s and 1980s) tended to view language as merely reflecting ‘gender differences’, which were presumed to already exist. A common criticism is that this work therefore failed to ask what gender actually is, and it often inadvertently tended to end up reinforcing gender stereotypes rather than challenging them. More recent approaches to gender and language differ in that they question this assumption and actually take an interrogation of that assumption as their central point of inquiry. Rather than language simply reflecting gender differences, current research views gender (and now sexuality as well) as being discursively constructed through language. This means that gender and sexuality are not necessarily seen as existing outside or prior to language. Rather, language itself is one means through which gender and sexuality are brought into existence. These approaches to gender and language (which emerged mainly from the 1990s onwards) are often referred to as discourse or discourse-based approaches (see, for example, Baker 2008; Ehrlich et al. 2014; Sunderland 2004). These types of approach are important because they draw attention to the fact that gender is a construct or a ‘fiction’ which is usually upheld through the widespread circulation of populist assumptions about gender which are often not true. Gender is also frequently constructed binary, with the differences between women and men, feminine and masculine, and so on being emphasized and exaggerated, whilst the many similarities and non-binary aspects of gender are often ignored and downplayed. Thus, when researchers do ask questions about difference in relation to language, gender, and sexuality, Sunderland (2014) argues that questions need to focus on the ways in which women and men, and boys and girls, are represented through language. In other words, it is important to examine representations of gender difference in order to expose them with a view to problematizing and challenging them. The development of the field has also seen an increasing influence from queer theory in recent years, with the concurrent development of the approach of queer linguistics (see, for example, Leap and Motschenbacher 2012; Motschenbacher and Stegu 2013) being a key characteristic of the field from the 1990s onwards. Within queer theory, particular use has been made of Butler’s (1990) work on performativity and how this social theory of gender and sexuality was influenced by, and now continues to inform, linguistic studies. According to Butler, gender (and sexuality) is something that we do, not what we are (in other words, gender is conceptualized as a verb or process rather than a noun or a state) and gender is performed through language and other semiotic modes. Butler describes gender as ‘an enactment that performatively constitutes the appearance of its own interior fixity’ (1990: 70). What this means is that, through performing gender, one simultaneously constructs one’s subjectivity and gendered identity and conceals the means by which that identity has been constructed so that it appears as though it has not been constructed at all but simply occurs ‘naturally’. In Butler’s notion of ‘performativity’, identities do not pre-exist but rather are brought into being by a series of ‘citational’ acts – including linguistic acts – which are understood to produce those identities in fluid and variable ways. Whilst a common misreading of Butler’s work assumes that gender and sexuality can be performed at will, this is actually an oversimplification and what Butler in fact argues (especially in her later work) is that gender and sexuality are ‘an improvisational possibility within a field of constraints’ (2004: 15) and that both gender and sexuality are mobilized and incited by social constraints and distinguished by them. Butler introduces the idea of ‘hierarchies of constraint’ which come from essentialized ideologies of gender and sexuality. Idealized, 152

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or hegemonic, masculinities and femininities stereotypically associated with heterosexuality are ranked higher than more marginalized genders often associated with non-heterosexual identities. This is one of the reasons that the field of language, gender, and sexuality has experienced a shift away from an almost exclusive focus on gender to a more integrated consideration of the interrelationship between language, gender, and sexuality. Cameron (2005) notes that the study of language and gender started to give greater prominence to sexuality throughout the 2000s which increasingly incorporated considerations of ‘queer’ gender identities and explorations of the relationship between gender and heteronormativity. In linguistics, work by Cameron (1997), Coates (2007), Leap (1996), Morrish and Sauntson (2007), Motschenbacher (2011), and others has shown that the semiotic resources associated with gender categories are deployed as a means of constructing sexual identities in and through discourse. Gender and sexual identity cannot be separated as the construction of both identities tends to rely on the same discursive resources. In sum, the field has been largely characterized by a historical shift away from focusing on language and gender difference, to questioning the very concept of difference. Queer theory has helped to reconceptualize both gender and sexuality in ways which have significantly moved the field forward in recent years. As part of this, the role that language plays in these gender and sexuality reconceptualization processes has become a critical issue in contemporary research. A number of existing textbooks and handbooks provide further information about the historical development of the field of language, gender, and sexuality. See, for example, Angouri and Baxter (2021), Baker (2008), Ehrlich et al. (2014), Harrington et al. (2008), Jule (2017), and Talbot (2010).

Critical issues and topics An overarching critical issue in language, gender, and sexuality research is its concern with exposing and addressing gender- and sexuality-based inequalities in their various linguistic manifestations. Queer linguistics has become a crucial approach for interrogating and understanding how gender- and sexuality-based inequalities are produced, reinforced, and sometimes challenged through language. The application of queer linguistics to analysis of a range of linguistic data and contexts encompasses many of the critical issues and topics currently being investigated in the field. Underpinning queer linguistics, queer theory is helpful for language, gender, and sexuality research because it takes ‘normality’ itself as its main object of investigation. Rather than presenting gender as an a priori category – as something which is already there waiting to be ‘discovered’ – queer theory interrogates the underlying preconditions of gender identity and how these may be enacted and formulated in discourse. One of its main aims is to challenge all forms of gender- and sexuality-based essentialism (the assumption that identities are innate and static and can be reduced to simple binaries) and to focus, instead, on how gender and sexuality identities and normative ideologies are constructed – partly through language. In this way, it is consistent with the discourse-based approaches to language, gender, and sexuality that emerged out of critiques of the older approaches and their problematic preoccupation with gender difference. Like queer theory, queer linguistics takes ‘heteronormativity’ as its main object of critical investigation. Heteronormativity is defined by Cameron (2005: 489) as ‘the system which prescribes, enjoins, rewards, and naturalises a particular kind of heterosexuality – monogamous, reproductive, and based on conventionally complementary gender roles – as the norm on which 153

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social arrangements should be based’. Queer theory interrogates the underlying preconditions of heteronormativity and presents a unified view of gender and sexuality in that it recognizes that cultural ideologies of gender normativity are bound up with assumptions of heterosexuality. Butler (1990) develops this notion in her claims that heterosexuality is naturalized by the performative repetition of normative gender identities. Thus, the principle of queer theory that claims an integral and definitional relationship between gender and sexuality is of central importance to queer linguistics and its applications. Queer linguistics draws on the principles of queer theory and applies them to the study of language. Motschenbacher and Stegu (2013: 522) helpfully define queer linguistics in concise terms as ‘critical heteronormativity research from a linguistic point of view’. Most definitions and explanations of queer linguistics within the broader field of language, gender, and sexuality are based around the concept of heteronormativity and use it as a theoretical and analytical starting point. Queer linguistics provides a helpful theoretical framework for examining a range of critical issues and topics in the field, focusing on how normative and non-normative (queer) constructions of sexual identity are enacted through and inscribed in language practices and how these language practices may effect particular discourses of sexuality. And queer linguistics questions how language functions to construct particular binaries relating to gender and sexuality (man and woman, gay and straight, etc.). Previous work by McElhinny (2014) and Zimman et al. (2014) importantly note that, in the past, these binaries have actually been useful in language, gender, and sexuality research in that they have been used as a strategic and political tool for rendering women (and sexual minorities) more visible rather than treating men (and heterosexuals) as representative of all language users. This can still be useful in contemporary language, gender, and sexuality research as long as the binary categories are not treated as a priori or pre-existing language, are not seen as static, and are examined critically. Within language, gender, and sexuality, queer linguistics is also applied to the critical investigation of heterosexual identities and desires, as well as those which are sexually marginalized. Cameron and Kulick (2003) note that research on language and sexual minorities tends to focus on analyzing linguistic manifestations of homophobia and other kinds of sexuality discrimination, whilst queer linguistics more broadly encompasses an analysis of discursive formations of all sexual identities, including heterosexualities. Part of this analysis involves exploring the linguistic means by which heterosexuality comes to be seen as the assumed default sexuality, whilst other sexualities become marked as non-normative. Furthermore, it is certain kinds of heterosexualities which are privileged (e.g. monogamous, dyadic, focused on marriage and reproduction), and this is also a concern of queer linguistics (also discussed by Leap and Motschenbacher 2012). What we can take from queer linguistics is that there also needs to be more critical scrutiny of how privileged forms of heterosexuality are discursively formed in applied contexts with a view to ultimately challenging and changing such practices. With this in mind, intersectionality (Crenshaw 1989) is a concept which is gaining traction in the field in order to acknowledge and understand how sexuality can involve more than the hetero-homo continuum. For example, identities and relationships may be discursively constructed as normal/not normal in relation to other social dimensions of identity such as ethnicity, age, and social class. Intersectionality in language, gender, and sexuality research is discussed further in the ‘Future directions’ section. More recently, scholars have been embedding queer linguistics into the wider approach of critical applied linguistics in order to analyze and problematize discursive constructions of heteronormativity in specific contexts. Critical applied linguistics has been defined as ‘the practice of applied linguistics grounded in a concern for addressing and resolving problems 154

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of inequality’ (Hall et al. 2017: 18). According to Hall et al. and Pennycook (2021), critical applied linguistics is an approach to language study which addresses a specific problem, arguing that the identification of a ‘real-world’ problem should be informed by the people who experience it. But their definition does not address key theoretical issues which have emerged from queer linguistics and are potentially useful to the field of applied linguistics more broadly. This has led to the integration of critical applied linguistics into queer linguistics by some scholars (e.g. Sauntson 2018a; Knisley 2022). Variously referring to queer applied linguistics as QAL or ALx, this new approach is loosely defined as critical applied linguistics which is informed by queer theory/queer linguistics and which is applied to addressing social concerns with inequalities around gender and sexuality. The influences of queer theory and the development of queer linguistics, and subsequently queer applied linguistics, described above have meant that the field has become increasingly concerned with conducting empirical research which aims to challenge binary and static constructions of gender, sex, and sexuality. As stated in the introduction, this shift has resulted in a greater focus on linguistic representations of gender and sexuality rather than a focus on the linguistic behaviour of groups and individuals. Furthermore, these theoretical shifts have initiated a re-evaluation of the categories themselves with questions asked about how language functions to actively produce socially contingent categories of sex, gender, and sexuality. The very idea of binary constructs in relation to both gender and sex has been criticized by a number of queer linguistics scholars in recent years (see, for example, the contributions in Zimman et al. 2014). But an important point is also made by Barrett (2014) who notes that, despite the challenging of binaries in queer theory, they do often have material consequences (i.e. their ‘reality’ is felt and experienced in physical and observable ways). Phenomena such as gender pay gaps and the numbers of hate crimes committed against gender and sexual minorities, for example, are well-documented examples of structural inequalities between women and men and people of differing genders and sexualities. This means that language analysis can examine gender binaries and ‘difference’ as long as it is in a way which explores how the physical and material effects of gender ideologies are experienced and constructed through language. Furthermore, Davis et al. (2014) suggest that gender and sexuality binaries should not necessarily be rejected or understood as oppressive. Rather, they urge researchers to be sensitive to how binaries work in particular sociocultural contexts and to pay attention to contextual detail. Drawing on intersectionality theory, they also encourage researchers to consider how binaries relating to gender and sexuality always intersect with other social categories and systems.

Current contributions and research Current contributions and areas of research within the field are diverse and ever-expanding. Thus, what is covered in this section is necessarily selective and focuses on areas of research which are proliferating and receiving much attention at the time of writing. The best way for readers to keep up-to-date with current contributions and research is to consult the two main academic journals in the field (Gender and Language and the Journal of Language and Sexuality), as well as the book series referenced in the ‘Future directions’ section of this chapter. There are also a number of published and regularly updated handbooks which provide overviews of current research in the field. One key area of research which has remained present in the field since its inception focuses on an exploration of how gender and sexuality identities can be produced through conversational interaction in informal situations and in institutional contexts. In this area of research, attention is paid to how recent work on gender and interaction has incorporated a consideration 155

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of sexuality alongside gender (in line with the principles of queer theory and queer linguistics) and has focused on how participants themselves produce and often problematize gender and sexuality categories. Some empirical studies on private contexts draw on interactionist sociolinguistic approaches to analyzing interactional data, whilst others utilize the tools of conversation analysis more explicitly to analyze how gender is produced in conversational interaction. Work examining the linguistic construction of gender and sexuality identities in more institutionalized settings has focused on contexts, such as education, workplaces, medical and healthcare settings, and legal settings. A further key area of research within the field focuses on linguistic representations of gender and sexuality in the media (see also Tagg, this volume). Media texts are considered to be central sites where discursive constructions of and negotiations over gender and sexuality take place. Therefore, research in this area investigates the multiple ways that language can be used in various media texts (including those which are multimodal) to construct certain kinds of men and/or women. Researchers have conducted empirical studies which have focused on a range of media texts using different analytic methods in order to uncover and problematize gender and sexuality ideologies in media texts. The types of media texts examined include newspaper articles, print and online personal advertisements, lifestyle magazines, image banks, websites, posters, and merchandise. This, of course, is by no means an exhaustive list of the types of media texts that can be examined in language, gender, and sexuality research. In more recent years, increasing attention has been paid to the role of language in relation to discursive constructions of gender and sexuality in forensic contexts (see Chapter 19, this volume). The field of forensic linguistics more broadly is concerned with applications of linguistic analysis to the law. This includes diverse topics, contexts, and data types, such as courtroom language and interaction; legal documents; police interviews with witnesses, victims, and those who have been arrested; and forensic analyses of voice. Within this specific area of language, gender, and sexuality research, work has been conducted examining some potentially challenging and sensitive topics, such as gendered and sexual violence, harassment, and consent and coercion. An increase in media attention to linguistic issues such as consent is also highlighting the growing importance of this field of research not just within the academic study of language, gender, and sexuality but in the wider social world. Key topics within this area include semantic issues around understandings of consent. This includes some analysis of people’s understandings of consent, how consent is represented in texts, and how ideas about consent (and the credibility of victims, witnesses, and defendants) can be manipulated through the use of language in trial interaction. Another focus involves analyzing how ideologies of gender and sexuality are produced in trial and tribunal interaction from rape and sexual assault cases. As stated earlier, the field of language, gender, and sexuality has become increasingly concerned with challenging binary and static constructions of gender, sex, and sexuality, and work has drawn attention to how ideological concepts such as ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ can be ‘detached from the bodies to which they are ideologically linked, with language playing a crucial role in this process’ (Davis et al. 2014: 3). This is perhaps highlighted the most clearly when examining the practices (including language practices) of those who live as gendervariant or transgender, and this is another key area of research that has been growing within the wider field of language, gender, and sexuality in recent years. Existing work on language, transgender, and gender variance falls into three broad areas: socio-phonetic studies of voice; discourse analysis studies of how language practices work to construct identities for transgender and gender-variant speakers; and representations of transgender identities in the publicfacing texts, such as news media. 156

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A further key area of research contributions to the field focuses on structural inequalities in language and language use and the way that these inequalities function to produce discriminatory effects in terms of gender and sexuality. Whilst early work in the field focused almost exclusively on the types of sexist language targeted at women, more contemporary work explores other forms of gender- and sexuality-based discriminatory language, such as homophobic and transphobic language. In all of the research on discriminatory language, attention has been paid to both forms of direct or overt discriminatory language but has also examined indirect or subtle forms of discriminatory language (including how silence can function to produce discriminatory discourses relating to certain kinds of gender and sexuality identities). Analysis of the language of discrimination potentially has useful synergies with other areas of applied linguistics which address issues relating to minoritized or oppressed social groups, such as race and ethnicity and those with minoritized language backgrounds (see, for example, Delfino and Alim, this volume, and Hornberger and De Korne, this volume).

Main research methods The field lends itself to highly varied ways in which aspects of language, gender, and sexuality can be investigated. Motschenbacher (2011) and Motschenbacher and Stegu (2013) argue that queer linguistics lends itself well to an eclectic combination of linguistic analytical methods (or methodological pluralism) in order to provide mutually qualifying positions. Leap (2020: 48–49) has also referred to a ‘scavenger methodology’ as being particularly appropriate for queer inquiry across a range of disciplines, including applied linguistics. In work which applies queer linguistics, various established methods are therefore drawn on in order to analyze different types of language data. Some of the most commonly used methods and analytical frameworks in contemporary language, gender, and sexuality research include (but are not restricted to) conversation analysis, corpus linguistics, critical discourse analysis, feminist post-structuralist discourse analysis, multimodal critical discourse analysis, linguistic landscapes, variationist and interactional sociolinguistics, sociophonetics, linguistic anthropology, and linguistic ethnography. All of these (and other) frameworks can sit within broader approaches such as queer linguistics. Whilst queer theory and queer linguistics can orient the researcher theoretically (which then helps to identify the priorities and purposes of the research), the analytical frameworks can then offer ways of looking at language in specific datasets in order to realize those theoretical priorities. Some of the frameworks used in language, gender, and sexuality are covered elsewhere in this Handbook (see, for example, the chapters on discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, critical discourse analysis, linguistic landscape, and social semiotics and multimodality). Other volumes include more extensive information about a range of methods used in the field (e.g. Angouri and Baxter 2021; Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 2013; Ehrlich et al. 2014; Harrington et al. 2008).

Recommendations for practice The field of language, gender, and sexuality has real-life implications for and applications in a wide range of contexts, including education, workplaces and employment domains, law, media, politics, and activism. Education (including language education) is of particular interest to the wider discipline of applied linguistics. Key interventions in language education have focused on challenging heteronormativity in textbooks and other learning materials (e.g. Pakula 2021; Pakula et al. 2015), interventions focused on classroom practices (e.g. Motschenbacher 2011; Sauntson 2018a; Nelson 2006), ‘queering’ curriculum content 157

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(e.g. Nelson 2006; Paiz 2020; Pakula 2021; Sauntson 2018a, 2018b, 2020), and incorporating gender and sexuality diversity awareness into teacher training (e.g. Motschenbacher 2011). Researchers such as Paiz (2020) and Nelson (2006) have highlighted a need to routinely conceptualize English language classrooms as ‘multisexual’ and present data to show that doing so can enhance the classroom and learning experience for all learners. In education beyond ESOL and language learning, research has recommended ways in which language can be used in classrooms and curriculum documents to create greater visibility and positive discourse around gender and sexuality diversity (e.g. Sauntson 2018a). Furthermore, recommendations have been made for paying closer attention to language in the context of gender- and sexuality-based bullying in schools, with researchers such as Motschenbacher (2011) and Sauntson (2018a) calling for all educational inclusion and anti-bullying policies to include a clear focus on language. This includes not only language which tackles overt forms of homophobia but also language which fill the ‘absences’ and ‘silences’ around difference and gender and sexuality diversity which currently pervade schools in many areas of the world (e.g. Sauntson and Borba 2021). In the domain of employment and workplaces, recommendations have been made for professional communication, particular in relation to issues of gender and leadership (e.g. Angouri et al. 2021; Baxter 2010, 2017; Mullany 2007). In legal contexts, work by scholars such as Ehrlich et al. (2016) has been influential in drawing attention to the coercive discourse often used in North American rape and sexual assault trials and how this needs to be challenged as part of the pursuit of justice in sexual offence cases. And work focusing on language, gender, and sexuality in media texts continues to increase awareness of the ways language can be used to reinforce damaging and restrictive ideologies, again with a view to challenging those ideologies. Leading language, gender, and sexuality scholars such as Freed (2014) and Cameron (2014, 2021) have, for some time, been questioning why language, gender, and sexuality scholarship is relatively infrequently taken up by practitioners outside academia when compared with other areas of applied linguistics research. Both observe that, despite scholarship continually challenging static and binary notions of gender and sexuality, popular accounts of ‘male and female language’ often remain pervasive and unchanged in the public domain. Freed notes that a considerable amount of print media continues to characterize women’s and men’s language as different with no reference at all to academic scholarship that has been conducted in language, gender, and sexuality for the past three decades. This, in itself, is a problematic area that is currently receiving attention by scholars in the field. Cameron observes that popular public ideologies about gender and language continue to differ greatly from social and linguistic realities as analyzed by scholars. One probable reason relates to public resistance to relinquishing the idea of binary gender and accommodating to greater variability within and across gender identities and behaviours. Freed (2014: 640) refers to a ‘fear of gender instability’ amongst the public, probably rooted in a gradual collective realization that gender ideologies which have been held for a long time are increasingly under threat. Both Freed and Cameron call for language, gender, and sexuality researchers to concentrate their efforts more on making inroads into challenging public discourses on gender, sexuality, and language and argue that one of the main future directions of the field needs to focus on increasing its public engagement and take-up by practitioners, policy-makers, and activists.

Future directions There continues to be an increasing scholarly interest in the field as evidenced through the introduction of two journals dedicated to the topic in recent years (Gender and Language; 158

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Journal of Language and Sexuality) and the increased expansion of the field’s main professional network – the International Gender and Language Association (IGALA). During this time, the British Association for Applied Linguistics (BAAL) has set up a dedicated special interest group in the area of language, gender, and sexuality. Even more recently, two new book series dedicated to publishing research in the field have emerged – Palgrave Studies in Language, Gender and Sexuality and Cambridge Elements in Language, Gender and Sexuality. These are in addition to the already-established Oxford Studies in Language, Gender and Sexuality series. A review of recent themes and priorities within these series, journals, and organizations suggests a number of continuing and emerging future directions for the field. There continues to be a growing body of research which examines diverse masculinities and femininities across different international and cultural contexts, some of which includes currently under-researched contexts, such as Africa, Italy, Japan, Russia, and South Asia. There also continues to be a growing interest in researching language in relation to ‘queer’ gender and sexuality identities, again in a range of transnational contexts (e.g. Baker and Balirano 2018; Barrett 2017). This includes investigations not only into language and minoritized sexualities and genders (e.g. bisexuality, asexuality, polysexuality, transgender) but also language and its relationship to marginalized forms of heterosexuality and non-binary gender identities. Related to this is research which focuses on gender- and sexuality-based discrimination in language and, importantly, how these forms of discriminatory language intersect with other forms of oppression and marginalization (such as those associated with race, ethnicity, nationality, and social class). Indeed, as stated earlier, there is a significant interest in examining the intersectional dimensions of language, gender, and sexuality at the time of writing. Starting from the idea that gender discrimination may be compounded by other identity positions and that there needs to be recognition of heterogeneity amongst women and men, Crenshaw’s (1989) theory of intersectionality provides a helpful framework for exploring the diverse ways in which language, gender, sexuality, race, age, class, nationality, and a range of other facets of ‘identity’ intersect to produce particular identifications and linguistic practices. The concept of intersectionality disrupts the notion of a singular and coherent identity in relation to gender and sexuality and recognizes that there is no one way to be a woman, man, gay, straight, and so on. Lazar (2017) highlights that this concept of intersectionality is particularly important in contemporary language, gender, and sexuality research because it encourages researchers to view identities as plural, intersecting, and mutually constitutive rather than as isolated categories. Levon (2015) notes additionally that intersectionality reminds language, gender, and sexuality researchers that no one category (e.g. ‘woman’ or ‘lesbian’) is sufficient to account for individual experience. Levon does point out that intersectional approaches do not necessarily need to be applied to all research investigating language and identity because, at times, identities such as gender and sexuality are clearly foregrounded. However, in certain research projects, an intersectional analysis may be more appropriate and effective to make sense of how people use language to mutually constitute multiple identities which include gender and sexuality. This is an issue which is likely to continue to receive much attention in language, gender, and sexuality in years to come. In recent years, the field has partly been characterized by a recognition that the majority of research has taken place and been published in the Global North, leading to a relative invisibility of issues that are relevant in other global settings. Alongside redressing this balance by focusing more on exploring issues relating to the Global South, another direction being taken by the field at the time of writing is to focus more on issues of migration, transnationalism, and globalism. There is also recognition within the field that much research has focused on English; therefore, another area ripe for development examines languages beyond English and 159

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multilingualism in relation to gender and sexuality. Lazar defines a transnational perspective as examining ‘contextualised concrete local instances of stereotypes in conjunction with a wider lens on other local and specific instances, so that transnational connections and patterns across locales can be brought into relief without making sweeping generalisations’ (2017: 576). In an increasingly globalized and mobile world, Lazar posits that transnational perspectives are useful for the study of language, gender, and sexuality because they can account for widespread phenomena, such as gender and sexual stereotyping, which often transcend national contexts. Another significant growing area is that which examines language, gender, and sexuality in digital and virtual settings (e.g. Myketiak 2020). A continued global increase in the use of digital communication is likely to mean that this aspect of research in the field continues to grow. Digital platforms such as social media provide spaces where language users can explicitly respond to rapidly changing geopolitical situations and events in ways that never used to be possible. These platforms, therefore, provide rich sources of data for examining how language is used in politically and socially charged situations in relation to gender and sexuality. Current research, for example, examines language, gender, and sexuality in online contexts in relation to issues such as terrorism, COVID-19, rape culture, activist movements (such as MeToo, Everyday Sexism, Everyone’s Invited, and Black Lives Matter), and issues relating to ecological and environmental justice. In terms of methodological and analytic frameworks, the field is following broader developments in applied linguistics in its increased use of forms of multimodal discourse analysis and creative inquiry (see Toohey, this volume). It is generally acknowledged that the field lends itself well to interdisciplinary research and to using combinations of different methods and techniques of linguistic analysis. The methodological pluralism of queer linguistics (and queer applied linguistics) is often innovative and is likely to continue making significant contributions to the development of inquiry in applied linguistics more broadly.

Related topics discourse analysis; critical discourse analysis; institutional discourse; identity; language, race, and ethnicity

Further reading Angouri, J. and Baxter, J. (eds.) (2021) The Routledge Handbook of Language, Gender and Sexuality, London: Routledge. (The Routledge Handbook of Language, Gender, and Sexuality provides an authoritative overview of the field and is a useful and up-to-date companion to the Routledge Handbook of Applied Linguistics. The Handbook contains detailed information about methodologies, theoretical frameworks, empirical studies, real-world applications, and suggestions for further reading which cover an extensive range of topics within the field.) Motschenbacher, H. (2010) Language, Gender and Sexuality: Poststructuralist Perspectives, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. (Motschenbacher’s volume is one of the few monographs dedicated to providing a detailed explanation of queer linguistics and its contributions to the field of language, gender, and sexual identity. The author situates queer linguistics within broader post-structuralist approaches and provides illustrative empirical analyses of language data to exemplify the approach. The book deals with repercussions of the discursive materialization of heteronormativity and gender binarism in various kinds of linguistic data.) Sauntson, H. (2020) Researching Language, Gender and Sexuality: A Student Guide, London: Routledge. (This volume is a textbook written primarily for undergraduate and postgraduate students of English language, linguistics, and gender studies. Drawing on international research, it leads readers through the process of undertaking research in order to explore how gender and sexuality are represented and constructed through language. Chapters within the book contain information about theories and 160

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methodologies used within the field, as well as empirical case studies that relate to a range of topics and contexts.) Zimman, L., Davis, J. and Raclaw, J. (eds.) (2014) Queer Excursions: Retheorizing Binaries in Language, Gender and Sexuality, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Zimman et al.’s edited volume directly addresses problems with binary concepts in language, gender, and sexuality as a way of demonstrating that researchers must be careful to avoid the assumption that their own preconceptions about binary social structures will be shared by the communities they study. Each contributing chapter offers a distinct perspective on gender- and sexuality-related binaries and their various relationships with language. Overall, the volume advocates for a retheorization of gender and sexuality binaries that pays careful attention to engagement with speakers’ own orientations to dichotomous systems in a range of contexts.)

References Angouri, J. and Baxter, J. (eds.) (2021) The Routledge Handbook of Language, Gender and Sexuality, London: Routledge. Angouri, J., Marra, M. and Dawson, S. (2021) ‘More than builders in pink shirts: Identity construction in gendered workplaces’, in J. Angouri and J. Baxter (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Language, Gender and Sexuality, London: Routledge. Baker, P. (2008) Sexed Texts: Language, Gender and Sexuality, London: Equinox. Baker, P. and Balirano, G. (eds.) (2018) Queering Masculinities in Language and Culture, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Barrett, R. (2014) ‘The emergence of the unmarked: Queer theory, language ideology, and formal linguistics’, in L. Zimman, J. Davis and J. Raclaw (eds.), Queer Excursions: Retheorizing Binaries in Language, Gender, and Sexuality, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 195–224. Barrett, R. (2017) From Drag Queens to Leathermen: Language, Gender, and Gay Male Subcultures, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Baxter, J. (2010) The Language of Female Leadership, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Baxter, J. (2017) Women Leaders and Gender Stereotyping in the UK Press: A Poststructuralist Approach, London: Springer. Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, London: Routledge. Butler, J. (2004) Undoing Gender, New York: Routledge. Cameron, D. (1997) ‘Performing gender identity: Young men’s talk and the construction of heterosexual masculinity’, in S. Johnson and U. Meinhof (eds.), Language and Masculinity, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 47–64. Cameron, D. (2005) ‘Language, gender and sexuality: Current issues and new directions’, Applied Linguistics, 26(4): 482–502. Cameron, D. (2014) ‘Gender and language ideologies’, in S. Ehrlich, M. Meyerhoff and J. Holmes (eds.), The Handbook of Language, Gender and Sexuality, 2nd ed., Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 279–296. Cameron, D. (2021) ‘The impact of language and gender studies: Public engagement and wider communication’, in J. Angouri and J. Baxter (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Language, Gender and Sexuality, London: Routledge. Cameron, D. and Kulick, D. (2003) Language and Sexuality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Coates, J. (2007) ‘“Everyone was convinced we were closet fags”: The role of heterosexuality in the construction of hegemonic masculinity’, in H. Sauntson and S. Kyratzis (eds.), Language, Sexualities and Desires: Cross-Cultural Perspectives, Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 41–67. Crenshaw, K. (1989) ‘Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracial politics’, University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1: Article 8. Davis, J., Zimman, L. and Raclaw, J. (2014) ‘Opposites attract: Retheorizing binaries in language, gender, and sexuality’, in L. Zimman, J. Davis and J. Raclaw (eds.), Queer Excursions: Retheorizing Binaries in Language, Gender and Sexuality, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 1–17. Eckert, P. and McConnell-Ginet, S. (2013) Language and Gender, 2nd ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ehrlich, S., Eades, D. and Ainsworth, J. (eds.) (2016) Discursive Constructions of Consent in the Legal Process, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ehrlich, S., Meyerhoff, M. and Holmes, J. (eds.) (2014) The Handbook of Language, Gender and Sexuality, 2nd ed., Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. 161

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Freed, A. (2014) ‘The public view of language and gender: Still wrong after all these years’, in S. Ehrlich, M. Meyerhoff and J. Holmes (eds.), The Handbook of Language, Gender and Sexuality, 2nd ed., Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 625–645. Hall, C., Smith, P. and Wicaksono, R. (2017) Mapping Applied Linguistics: A Guide for Students and Practitioners, 2nd ed., London: Routledge. Harrington, K., Litosseliti, L., Sauntson, H. and Sunderland, J. (eds.) (2008) Gender and Language Research Methodologies, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Jule, A. (2017) A Beginner’s Guide to Language and Gender, 2nd ed., Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Knisley, K. (2022) ‘L/G/B and T: Queer excisions, entailments, and intersections’, in J. Paiz and J. Coda (eds.), Intersectional Perspectives on LGBTQ+ Issues in Modern Language Teaching and Learning, Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 153–182. Lazar, M. (2017) ‘Sociolinguistics of gender/sexual stereotyping: A transnational perspective’, Gender and Language, 11(4): 575–585. Leap, W. (1996) Word’s Out: Gay Men’s English, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Leap, W. (2020) Language before Stonewall, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Leap, W. and Motschenbacher, H. (2012) ‘Launching a new phase in language and sexuality studies’, Journal of Language and Sexuality, 1(1): 1014. Levon, E. (2015) ‘Integrating intersectionality in language, gender, and sexuality research’, Language and Linguistics Compass, 9(7): 295–308. McElhinny, B. (2014) ‘Theorizing gender in sociolinguistics and anthropology’, in S. Ehrlich, M. Meyerhoff and J. Holmes (eds.), The Handbook of Language, Gender and Sexuality, 2nd ed., Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 48–67. Morrish, L. and Sauntson, H. (2007) New Perspectives on Language and Sexuality, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Motschenbacher, H. (2011) ‘Taking queer linguistics further: Sociolinguistics and critical heteronormativity research’, International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 212: 149–179. Motschenbacher, H. and Stegu, M. (2013) ‘Queer linguistic approaches to discourse: Introduction’, Discourse and Society, 24(5): 519–535. Mullany, L. (2007) Gendered Discourse in the Professional Workplace, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Myketiak, C. (2020) Online Sex Talk and the Social World: Mediated Desire, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Nelson, C. (2006) ‘Queer inquiry in languages education’, Journal of Language, Identity and Education, 5(1): 51–66. Paiz, J. (2020) Queering the English Language Classroom, London: Equinox. Pakula, L. (ed.) (2021) Linguistic Perspectives on Sexuality in Education: Representations, Constructions and Negotiations, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Pakula, L., Pawelczyk, J. and Sunderland, J. (2015) Gender and Sexuality in English Language Education: Focus on Poland, London: British Council. Pennycook, A. (2021) Critical Applied Linguistics: A Critical Re-introduction, 2nd ed., London: Routledge. Sauntson, H. (2018a) Language, Sexuality and Education, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sauntson, H. (2018b) ‘Language, sexuality and inclusive pedagogy’, International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 29(3): 322–340. Sauntson, H. (2020) ‘Changing educational policies: Language and sexuality in schools’, in L. Mullany (ed.), Professional Communication: Consultancy, Advocacy, Activism, Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 273–290. Sauntson, H. and Borba, R. (2021) ‘Silence and sexuality in school settings: A transnational perspective’, in J. Stern, M. Walejko, C. Sink and W. Ping Ho (eds.), The Bloomsbury Handbook of Solitude, Silence and Loneliness, London: Bloomsbury, pp. 174–188. Sunderland, J. (2004) Gendered Discourses, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Sunderland, J. (2014) ‘Similarities and distinctions in gender and language study: Harry Potter literacies, language textbooks, and picturebooks featuring same-sex parent families’, Keynote Lecture Presented at the 8th International Gender and Language Association Conference, Vancouver, Canada. Talbot, M. (2010) Language and Gender: An Introduction, 2nd ed., Cambridge: Polity Press. Zimman, L., Davis, J. and Raclaw, J. (eds.) (2014) Queer Excursions: Retheorizing Binaries in Language, Gender and Sexuality, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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13 Language and race Jennifer B. Delfino and H. Samy Alim

Introduction While spanning multiple disciplines and approaches, the dedicated study of language, race, and ethnicity has mainly developed within sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and applied linguistics. In recent years, these subfields have been in closer conversation theoretically and methodologically, given the interdisciplinary approach referred to as raciolinguistics, the emerging area of inquiry that applies the diverse methods of linguistic analysis to ask and answer critical questions about the relations between language, race, and power (Alim 2016a: 27). While outlined in Alim (2016b), a few tenets are worth highlighting here. First, researchers in raciolinguistics are committed to theorizing language and race together, paying particular attention to how these social processes mediate one another and are mutually constitutive. Second, the field emphasizes the linguistic and discursive construction of race and ethnicity, while simultaneously noting their endurance as social realities for subjugated racially and ethnically minoritized populations, (im)migrants, and other oppressed groups. Third, the field takes a comparative approach to better understand the role of language in maintaining and challenging racism as a global system of capitalist oppression. Fourth, scholars have begun to take intersectional approaches that understand race as always produced in conjunction with class, gender, sexuality, religion, (trans)nationalism, and other axes of social differentiation used in complex vectors of oppression. Researchers in the field of language and race also consider the implications of their work on language education.

Historical perspectives At the outset, it is imperative to state that Black linguists, for well over half a century, have long written about the relationship between language and race and between language, capitalism, and colonialism. For many, these issues were inextricable. To pioneering sociolinguist Geneva Smitherman, the linguistic question was never just about language; citing Fanon and others early on, she argued that it was about how Africans survived colonialism, imperialism, enslavement, and ‘the conditions of servitude, oppression, and life in America’ (1977: 2) in order to ‘create a culture of survival in an alien land’. To answer any question about Black language, DOI: 10.4324/9781003082637-15

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then, one had to begin with when ‘Africans’ became ‘Negroes’, or ‘at least as far back as 1619 when a Dutch vessel landed in Jamestown with a cargo of twenty Africans’ (4–5). Another pioneering theorist of language and race, Arthur Spears, emphasized that the terror, violence, and brutality of these systems are not only the macro-contexts within which race and language are produced, but white supremacy comes to depend on the idea of race and, therefore, processes of racialization for its continued propagation (1999). As Spears (2020) consistently argues, we need to approach questions of language and race by attending to the ‘political-economic pentad’, which includes global economic exploitation, the state, ideologycoercion for the purposes of social and resource control via regime maintenance, and the socioeconomic, authoritarian, and patriarchal nature of oppressive systems. Smitherman and Spears were also two of the four editors of a major linguistic anthropological project, an important precursor to raciolinguistics, Black Linguistics: Language, Society, and Politics in Africa and the Americas (Makoni et al. 2003). Further, Black writers and intellectuals like James Baldwin (1981 [1979]) wrote over 40 years ago that debates about Black language have ‘nothing to do with the language itself but with the role of language. Language, incontestably, reveals the speaker’. It is not the presence of the sounds but rather the presence of the speakers – the Black sons and daughters of people who would have otherwise been born on the African continent were it not for the terror of enslavement – that reveals their complicity with the imperialist, white settler colonial-capitalist system from which they continue to benefit. US sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists have long been interested in many of the same political and social issues facing Black people with regard to language and race. One was the racialized educational inequality that quickly became evident in the wake of school desegregation (Brown v. Board of Education 1954). According to the dominant perspective at the time, glossed as deficit theorizing, Black students appeared not to read or communicate as well as white students due to purported linguistic and cognitive deficiencies caused by poverty. But sociolinguists who developed descriptive studies of Black language and other ethnolects, as well as anthropologists who studied the communicative practices of Black Americans and Native Americans, determined that the language of racially minoritized students had systematic, rule-bound differences not recognized by the school system. The ‘difference’ movement of the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s formed the basis for the distinctive ethnoracial language perspective, which examines the linguistic patterns that distinguish ethnoracial groups (Reyes and Lo 2009; Chun and Lo 2015). The difference paradigm has had a lasting impact on how language has been theorized in relation to race and/or ethnicity. For one, it not only presumes a one-to-one mapping of language onto social group (Irvine and Gal 2000), but it also presumes that ethnoracial language varieties can be differentiated from and compared to a Standard English by noting the patterning of distinctive features that are considered to be non-standard. The distinctiveness paradigm is endemic to second-wave variationist studies (Eckert 2012) that analyze the code-switching and style-shifting practices of ethnoracial minorities and to linguistic anthropological studies of ethnoracially defined speech communities. In the field of applied linguistics, the difference movement has guided the majority of efforts to provide socially just education to bilingual and racially minoritized students. Here, the goal is to validate stigmatized language varieties while providing access to standard or academic English. This is seen in additive approaches in ESL (Bartlett and García 2011) or in programmatic approaches to help Black students read and write so-called Standard English (Labov and Baker 2010). Critics note how the distinctiveness model constructs language differences along the lines of racial and ethnic difference which reifies these differences as essentialized cultural or biological realities. As raciolinguistics scholars note, the distinctiveness paradigm’s theorizing of 164

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difference reproduces essentializing notions about race and language that ultimately work to construct whiteness as normative or ideal (Urciuoli 1996; Flores and Rosa 2015). As discussed separately in this chapter, raciolinguistics has helped initiate a shift from analyzing the linguistic practices of particular groups to how ideas about race and language construe some linguistic forms or practices as non-normative and in relation to which types of speakers. Building upon Alim’s (2004a) previous research, raciolinguistics scholars have recognized that white teachers’ beliefs about their Black students, and their language, to take just one example, depended largely upon their hearing of Black speech through the ideological lens of linguistic supremacy, which served to uphold white supremacist logics of both language and race. White teachers were hearing ‘errors’ in their Black students’ speech where there were none, even going so far as to invent syntactic structures that are not found in any variety of English, as well as missing various complex aspects of Black linguistic production. As Flores and Rosa (2015) argued, this example demonstrates the powerful ways that raciolinguistic ideologies of the white listening subject can stigmatize language use regardless of one’s empirical linguistic practices. Raciolinguistics complements the educational theory of culturally sustaining pedagogies (Paris and Alim 2017; Alim et al. 2020a). CSP settings demand explicitly pluralist outcomes that are not centred on dominant white, middle-class, monolingual/monocultural norms of educational achievement. Whereas previous approaches sought to build upon the cultural and linguistic practices of students to support academic learning, CSPs, as Lee (2017: 274) noted, ‘have expanded these ideas to argue that diverse funds of knowledge and culturally inherited ways of navigating the world need to be sustained as goods unto themselves’. This fundamental shift argues that the cultural and linguistic practices and knowledges of communities of colour have always been vital in their own right and should be creatively foregrounded rather than merely viewed as resources to take learners (almost always unidirectionally) from ‘where they are at’ to some presumably ‘better’ place, or ignored altogether. These scholars are not interested in relegating learners’ cultural and linguistic strengths as tools for advancing the learning of an acceptable curricular canon, a standard variety of language, or some other academic skill. Rather, extending Alim’s approach to critical language awareness, they are interested in producing learners that can interrogate what counts as ‘acceptable’ or ‘canonical’, what language varieties are heard as ‘standard’, what ways of knowing are viewed as ‘academic’, and how these perspectives came to be the dominant ones. These pedagogies do much more than simply take students’ language into account; they also ‘account for the interconnectedness of language with the larger sociopolitical and sociohistorical systems that help to maintain unequal power relations in a still-segregated society’ (Alim 2005: 24). Students are encouraged to ask questions like the following: How did these particular perspectives come to be the dominant ones? Whose purposes do they serve? And how do they uphold white supremacist systems of racial capitalism and its efforts to produce not critically thinking human beings, but cheap sources of labour (Ladson-Billings et al. 2023)?

Critical issues and topics The linguistic construction of ethnoracial identities The linguistic construction of racial and ethnic identities is a central theme in the study of language and race. Researchers start with the premise that identities are socially constructed through situated linguistic or discursive interactions. These acts of identity (LePage and 165

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Tabouret-Keller 1985) recruit social identity models circulated by larger-level practices and institutions and scale up to reproduce or transform racialization and ethnicization processes. Many language and identity studies are focused on teens and youth in school-based settings, as schools are key sites of racialization and racial learning. Rampton’s (1995) research, which uses interactional sociolinguistics to examine crossing, or how multi-ethnic youth at a London high school use language to redraw lines of race and ethnicity, is an early exemplar of this approach. Much of the work that was produced at the same time or which followed, particularly by US-based linguistic anthropologists, used theories of indexicality (Ochs 1992; Silverstein 2003) to explain how racial and ethnic identities are recruited and transformed using language (Cutler 2003; Mendoza-Denton 2008; Bucholtz 2011). Indexicality, a concept rooted in Peircean semiotics, illustrates how participants position themselves in relation to wider meanings, practices, and structures related to race and, not in the least, language. Linguistic forms, practices, and varieties are thus analyzed as signs that may ‘point to’ socially circulating models of racialized personhood in any given interaction rather than as the objective property of a given racialized or ethnicized group (Reyes 2009; Rosa 2019). This approach helped shift the frame of analysis from describing the distinctive language and identity practices of particular groups to interrogating the ideological foundations of racial and linguistic difference. Linguistic anthropologists have produced much research on identity and identification, but sociolinguists and others that take language as the primary object of analysis and theory have also contributed to a theory of language and identity as co-constructed. In the quantitative paradigm of variationist sociolinguistics, racial/ethnic identity was long treated as a self-evident variable by which one could track linguistic variation and change (Labov 1972). Second-wave variationists (Eckert 2012) in the US focused on the linguistic practices of African Americans and other racialized minorities using the distinctive ethnoracial language paradigm. This paradigm sees ethnolects as cohesive, intact language systems with systematically patterned features and structures; identity is not treated as a social construct in this work but instead as an identity characteristic of language speakers (Chun and Lo 2015). This body of work was followed by a third wave of quantitative variationist studies, which examined identity as mutually shaping language and as shaped by it via an approach referred to as ‘communities of practice’ (Bucholtz 1999). Communities of practice helped unsettle broad, essentializing claims about ‘racial/ethnic groups and their language’ by grounding language and identity practices in interactions that show overlaps between or variations within language/ speech communities. Importantly, such studies show that individual language users can and do orient themselves differently to shared identity models of race, ethnicity, and other categories such as gender and class. Studies on the code-switching and style-shifting practices of racially minoritized groups highlight how they negotiate multiple identities across interactions, blending or crossing styles to challenge oppressive ideologies and to claim identities outside of received models (Zentella 1997; Bailey 2002; Blackburn 2005).

Linguistic racialization and ethnicization A central theme in the study of language and race is linguistic racialization and ethnicization, or the ways in which race and ethnicity, as institutionalized categories of social difference, come to be ‘imagined, produced, and reified through language practices’ (Chun and Lo 2015). Race and ethnicity are different social constructs, and they change over time as ideologies of difference that are designed to support white supremacy. Social theorists often discuss racialization or ethnicization, but not one in relation to the other, and they are often conflated or interchanged. However, one of the most useful discussions on the differences between them 166

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comes from scholars who note that language ideologies have played a significant role in racialization and ethnicization processes in the US. Whereas racialized groups are considered to be unassimilably different via essentialized representations of biology, language, and culture, ethnicized groups are considered to be at least partially assimilated (Urciuoli 1996; Leeman 2004). Ethnic groups are perceived to be able to more easily maintain linguistic practices such as bilingualism, whereas the bi- or multilingualism or non-standard English of racialized groups are seen as a threat to the nation, in the US to include Blacks, Native Americans, Latinx, and Asian Americans (Urciuoli 2001; Alim and Smitherman 2012; Rosa 2019; Delfino 2020b). Language, taken together with racial ideologies about physical and cultural difference, may thus be used to racialize particular bodies as Others and ethnicize other bodies as acceptable or non-threatening.

Language ideologies Language ideologies, or cultural systems of beliefs about language(s), their value, and the people who speak them (Irvine and Gal 2000) are a central component of language, race, and ethnicity studies and raciolinguistics especially. Raciolinguistics research is deeply indebted to research that theorizes the workings of racialization by foregrounding the critical role of language ideologies, viewing them as inextricable from ideologies of race and vice versa (Alim 2016a). The concept of raciolinguistic ideologies takes previous research on English-only and Standard English language ideologies and extends this work to examine the co-construction of linguistic and racial ideologies, notably in the work of Flores and Rosa (2015) and Rosa (2019). Oppressive racial ideologies are often expressed, and indeed masked, via language ideologies that view only some Black speakers as ‘articulate’ (Alim and Smitherman 2012, 2020), ideologies of ‘appropriateness’ (Fairclough 1992; Flores and Rosa 2015; Love-Nichols 2018), and the widespread belief that racialized minorities do not have a command of ‘academic language’ (Flores 2020) or code-switching skills (Zentella 1997; Alim 2004b). Alim and Smitherman (2020) note that raciolinguistic exceptionalism – ‘whereby exceptionalism occurs through white racist evaluations of, and ideologies about, both language and race’ (p. 473) – works to produce a normative Black speaking subject who is only inarticulate when perceived through white eyes/ears. Similarly, Flores and Rosa (2015) and Flores (2020) note how ideologies of appropriateness and the insistence on academic language as an objectively identifiable set of linguistic forms and structures rearticulate the major presuppositions of standard language ideology. But standard or academic language is essentially a moving target: it is always what a Black or Latinx speaking subject does not produce, and it is never identifiable as a language variety with consistent forms, features, or grammatical structures.

Current contributions and research Coloniality, post-racialism, and racial reproduction Current research on language and race focuses on the white settler colonialist foundations of linguistics and other fields. There is particular emphasis on how liberal and progressive ideologies share the same ideological foundations of racial and linguistic difference as those considered explicitly racist or conservative (Kroskrity 2020; Delfino 2021). In the social sciences, race is often replaced with culture or ethnicity as an avoidance strategy aimed at achieving distance from the colonialist and racist foundations of theory and 167

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practice (Chun and Lo 2020). Similarly, the perceived reconservatization of liberal democratic states has been discursively constructed as a return to a regressive racism among liberals and progressives; this framing erases the continued settler colonialist practices of nations such as the US (Rosa and Bonilla 2017). But current research shows that race and racism have not been eliminated from the social, political, or intellectual fabric; rather, they continue to be essential to them (Alim and Reyes 2011). Lastly, since the focus should not exclusively be on how people of colour are dominated, more research is needed on language and social justice (Avineri et al. 2018) and the ‘macromovement’ of antiracist discourse writ large (van Dijk 2021).

White supremacy and the perceiving subject A related strand of research focuses on how language is used to maintain white supremacist structures and practices and vice versa: how white supremacy shapes perceptions about language and linguistic differences. This is a recent but important shift considering that the majority of research on language, race, and ethnicity has focused on what non-whites do, linguistically speaking, with little to no critical reflection on how language practices are heard and perceived by listening subjects who sponsor white supremacist ideologies. White supremacy is not a specific set of ideas or practices intentionally taken up by whites who intend to further racist beliefs or projects. Rather, white supremacy is the institutional (re)centring of whiteness as normative, ideal, or desirable (Shankar 2019). It is reproduced in liberal democratic strategies of inclusion, for example, diversity and multiculturalism efforts by the nation-state (Povinelli 2002; Ahmed 2012), and in linguistic or discursive practices that continue to mark racial difference in relation to whiteness as the established or ideal norm (Hill 2008; Shankar 2015; Delfino 2021). With regard to the linguistic construction of white supremacy, Hill’s (2008) work on the everyday language of white racism shows that whites do not consider themselves to be racist even as they take up racist language practices. ‘Covert’ linguistic racism, evident in practices such as linguistic mocking, construe racialized minorities as Other. Language appropriation also works as a covertly racist linguistic practice that works to recentre whiteness rather than as inclusion or diversification. For example, corporations tweet their products using Black language but at a ‘safe distance’ from actual contexts of Blackness (Roth-Gordon et al. 2020). At the same time, minoritized groups may take up mock white to challenge practices and structures of white supremacy (Basso 1978; Mason Carris 2011; Rahman 2004; Clark 2014; Delfino 2020a). A growing body of work examines the linguistic practices of white nationalist groups, who use everyday talk and social media to promote explicitly white supremacist beliefs and ideologies. Kosse (2018) analyzes how white nationalists in the US combine Disney videos with mock AAL and mock ‘Jewish’ voice-overs to frame these groups as an existential threat to whites. Perrino and Jereza’s (2020) research examines how Italian joke-tellers code-switch from standardized Italian to their local varieties while telling jokes about migrants and how this switching creates exclusionary intimacies by producing both xenophobic stances towards migrants and inclusionary stances towards ‘real’ Italians who laugh, applaud, and otherwise share in these racist representations. Another study examines how right-wing French nationalists have framed debates about the loss of the circonflexe, a suprasegmental vowel accent marker, as a threat to the nation, which is fundamentally thought of as white (Tebaldi 2020). These studies highlight how everyday discursive practices are linked to the increasingly aggressive, exclusionary, anti-immigrant politics that characterize the rise of racist, right-wing politics across 168

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Europe and the United States, where non-white immigrants suffer increasing rates of violence, discrimination, and even use of military force and concentration camps. White supremacist ideologies of difference also shape listening and perceiving practices that construe the speech of ethnoracial minorities as disorderly, deviant, abject, or threatening (Urciuoli 2020). Thus, recent scholarship has been theorizing how race becomes an intelligible category as listening/perceiving subjects report about what they hear/perceive. Drawing from Inoue’s (2006) work on the listening subject, a central theme has developed around the idea of white or institutionalized perceiving subjects (Rosa and Flores 2017; Flores et al. 2018). The perceiving subject does not refer to particular individuals or type of person (i.e. white). Rather, it is an ideological frame that is recruited in the hearing or perceiving of a linguistic feature or form, in other words a positionality that is taken up in relation to the intersubjective production of language. Perceptive subjecthood is fundamentally shaped by the perceived superiority of white speech and determines how particular voices or bodies are racialized as Other; this racialization can even shift across contexts of interaction if they are heard or seen differently against readings of their body and other signifying practices (Alim and Smitherman 2012; Rosa 2019). Indeed, the contingent nature of listening subjecthood is what gives white supremacy its power: a speaker who is ‘seen’ as Black, Latinx, or Asian may be judged as an imperfect English speaker – for example, perceived as lacking grammatical correctness or having an accent – even when they are producing target forms (Rosa 2016; Delfino 2020b). And yet white students enrolled in bilingual language programs benefit from the determination that they are skilled bilinguals, despite the fact that their proficiency levels do not match what is required of those learning English as a second language (Chaparro 2019; Rosa and Flores 2017). Listening subjecthood thus has a direct impact on social stratification, as white English speakers more easily get higher-paying jobs requiring dual language fluency, while bilingual Spanish speakers do not.

Main research methods Data collection methods Ethnographic approaches that combine discourse analysis with long-term participant observation and in-depth conversations with community members are central to the study of language, race, and ethnicity and to raciolinguistics especially, as researchers are generally seeking to examine qualitative questions and claims (see Sections ‘Historical perspectives’ and ‘Critical issues and topics’). Participant observation is particularly important for comparing what is observed versus what participants report and to gain information on the intersubjective construction of sociocultural and linguistic phenomena (Bucholtz and Hall 2005). But consistent with third-wave variationism, quantitative studies have also been applied to investigate not only how linguistic variables correlate with social categories but also the social meaning of those variables (Gafter 2016, citing Eckert 2008; Podesva 2016; Sharma 2016). Thus, combining quantitative methods with qualitative approaches often helps to capture broader patterns in the social construction of race and ethnicity.

Data analysis methods The study of language, race, and ethnicity is at its most interdisciplinary with respect to data analysis, as many researchers rely on multiple frameworks spanning discourse and conversation analysis (Bucholtz 2011), semiotic discourse analysis (Rosa 2019; Delfino 2020a, 2020b; 169

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Smalls 2020), interactional sociolinguistics (Rampton 1995; Williams 2017), quantitative variationism (Mendoza-Denton 2008), and the integration of all of these approaches (Alim 2004b). US scholars, in particular, have built on Peircean semiotics (Silverstein 2003; Agha 2005) to examine how linguistic and racial meanings are recruited and bundled together through processes of indexicality (Chun and Lo 2015). The focus on such work is the linguistic construction of racialized models of personhood in interaction and how they scale up to reproduce or transform racialization and ethnicization processes.

Future directions As the study of language, race, and ethnicity moves forward, the concepts of translanguaging (García and Li 2009) and transracialization (Alim 2016a, 2016b; Tetreault 2016) are in further development as processes that intersect. For example, a number of studies illustrate how linguistic constructions of race disrupt received notions of the relationship between race and language (Delfino 2020b; Severo and Makoni 2020; Wirtz 2020) and/or the idea of race as a stable construct (Alim 2016b; Thu and Motha 2021). Others use a translanguaging lens to examine the heterogeneity inherent to ethnolinguistic practices and to disrupt the idea of monologic language communities (Seltzer 2017; Morales 2020). Such studies are especially key for advancing the study of bilingualism, which sees the code-switching and code-mixing practices of racialized bilinguals, including Latinx, through the lens of deficit (Vogel and García 2017). Most recently, building upon Ibrahim’s (2003) work on African immigrants to Canada, Smith and Warrican (2021) examine how Black Caribbean immigrants come to the process of engaging in metalinguistic, metacultural, and metaracial understanding. Further, raciolinguistics has insisted upon intersectional approaches ‘that understand race as always produced in conjunction with class, gender, sexuality, religion, (trans)national, and other axes of social differentiation’ used in complex vectors of oppression. This has necessitated a return to the body as a site of analysis. Smalls (2020: 233), for example, draws from her ethnographic research with Black-identified youth in the United States and Liberia to explore ‘how antiblackness disproportionately allocates a great deal of semiotic weight to their racialized (and gendered, classed, etc.) bodies’. Her raciosemiotic research continues the focus on the semiosis of blackness in young people’s lives ‘as they discursively reproduce, reconfigure, and refuse different models of racialized personhood’ (Smalls 2020: 243). Delfino’s (2020a) study examines how gender ideologies influence Black students’ voicing of Black language as powerful/articulate and white speech as effeminate and weak. Her work illustrates how patriarchal constructions of gender may be recruited as counterhegemonic work aimed at disrupting oppressive raciolinguistic ideologies, such as what counts as articulate or appropriate speech in public-institutional spaces such as the school. Morgan (2020) argues that Black women’s counterlanguage ideology is a foundational element of African American language ideology and has expanded into the public sphere as a response to racism, class oppression, and gender inequality in contemporary US society. China (2020) looks at the multimodal, online construction of Beyoncé as an embodiment of ‘the Black gaze’, where discussions about her Black womanhood/feminism are central to how Tumblr users interrupt white supremacist understandings of her as a disruptive figure. Alim et al. (2020b) study freestyle rap sites to show how young men of colour in different political economic contexts (US and South Africa) often challenge the dominance of whiteness, while simultaneously celebrating and reifying particular kinds of ‘Blackness/colouredness’ at the expense of already marginalized gendered and sexualized bodies. These hegemonic practices reconstitute social divisions that benefit cisheteropatriarchy, an ideological system that naturalizes normative views of what it means 170

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to look and act like a straight man and marginalizes women, femininity, and all gender-nonconforming bodies that challenge the gender binary; a ‘system based on the exploitation and oppression of women and sexual minorities’ (p. 292). Finally, queer perspectives are an emerging focus in language and race research. Earlier work in language and sexuality has addressed the racializing of bodies and spaces among gay men in Cape Town, South Africa (Leap 2005), and queer Black linguistic practices among Black gay youth in Philadelphia, US (Blackburn 2005). More recently, Cornelius and Barrett (2020) argue that any study of language and the body must include a focus on race and racialization or risk being ‘mired in a swamp of racial bias’ (p. 333). They show how Black gay men use language to creatively navigate the double-bind of the racism ‘prevalent in predominantly white gay male communities and homophobia in some Black communities’ (p. 316). In their indepth analysis of the speech of one Black gay man (Bakari), they examine how he monitors his language and comportment as he constructs a ‘Black gay identity’. Bakari creates an ‘ambassador’, a persona that might, at least temporarily, evade racist, heteropatriarchal expectations, even within gay communities. More research is needed to show how the multiply marginalized creatively negotiate dangerous, discriminatory discourses through the use of complex linguistic repertoires.

Related topics bilingual and multilingual education; multilingualism; language and culture; critical discourse analysis; identity; minority/Indigenous language revitalization; languaging and translanguaging

Further reading Alim, H. S., Reyes, A. and Kroskrity, P. (eds.) (2020) Oxford Handbook of Language and Race, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. (This edited volume centres themes of coloniality and migration, embodiment and intersectionality, and racisms and representations.) Ibrahim, A. (2014) The Rhizome of Blackness: A Critical Ethnography of Hip-Hop Culture, Language, Identity, and the Politics of Becoming, New York: Peter Lang. (This book is a theoretically sophisticated, critical ethnography of language, race, and youth culture that examines the dialectic space between language learning and multilayered identity investments.) Smalls, K., Spears, A. and Rosa, J. (2021) ‘Language and white supremacy’, Special issue of Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 31(2). (This collection of articles specifically engages white supremacy in an effort to advance theoretical discussions of the study of language and systemic racism, from institutional permeations to everyday interactions.) Von Esch, K. S., Motha, S. and Kubota, R. (2020) ‘Race and language teaching’, Language Teaching 53: 391–421. (This article offers intersectional, globally themed critiques on theorizing race and language and discusses how language teaching and the hegemony of English have always been part of racist settler colonialism and imperialism.)

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14 Politics and applied linguistics Philip Seargeant

Introduction There is a long-running debate in linguistics about the role that political concerns should play as part of the focus of the discipline. On one side of the divide are internalists, characterized by Chomsky’s belief that questions of power simply are not an issue linguists should be addressing; on the other are those who feel that attempting to separate language as a cognitive or biological function from the way it is used as a means of communication in society – and by extension, the way it is intimately tied up with issues of power – is misguided, if not impossible. The debate tends to spin into stereotype, turning differences of approach around what constitutes linguistics into value judgements about the validity of the opposing side’s interests. As a counter to some of this stereotyping, Chomsky himself, for instance, has explicitly stated that sociolinguistics is ‘a perfectly legitimate enquiry’, but one which is ‘externalist by definition’, and thus committed to different research aims from those he himself is pursuing (2000: 156). Despite this, the divide remains a point of contention within the broader field of study (e.g. Lukin 2011; Davis 2020) to the extent that the way a particular theoretical approach (or subdiscipline) views the role played by politics in its conceptualization of ‘language’ (and thus as part of the subject of study for the approach) has become a key indicator of disciplinary identity. In the case of applied linguistics, political issues have always been a central concern of the discipline, whether they are addressed implicitly or explicitly. If we take Brumfit’s succinct definition of applied linguistics as the ‘investigation of real-world problems in which language is a central issue’ (1995: 27), it becomes inevitable that, assuming we believe that the ‘real world’ is intrinsically political in some way, the discipline itself needs to address issues of power. Those areas of investigation which overlap with sociolinguistics and discourse analysis often have an explicitly political focus; while forms of critical linguistics (e.g. critical discourse analysis), and critical applied linguistics (Pennycook 2001), include not only a political focus but also something of a political agenda. For this reason, the issue of politics can be seen as essential to applied linguistics. In this chapter I will focus on three main issues concerning the relationship between politics and language. The first of these will focus on politics about language – the way that (ideas about) language, particular languages, and language use become the site for political debate 176

DOI: 10.4324/9781003082637-16

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and struggle. This includes, for example, debates over the status of the so-called Standard English, especially as these influence educational policy and practice. The second category is ‘politics enacted through language’ – the ways that language use itself achieves or is subject to political effects. The prevailing maxim here is that language use is never neutral and that discourse is one of the prime resources used for the organization of social life (Searle 2010). The influence of theories of discourse that were developed in the 1970s and ’80s, particularly within French post-structuralist circles (e.g. the works of Foucault and Derrida), has been especially notable within this category, and in the last few decades, this influence has been felt across the social sciences via various forms of ‘critical’ studies (critical race studies, critical gender studies, etc. [see, for example, Delgado and Stefancic 2017]). The third category I will focus on is a subset of the second and looks at the ways that applied linguistics is relevant specifically to electoral politics – that is, how insights from linguistics can be applied to the analysis, or even the practice, of political engagement, especially in the context of electoral or party politics. The boundaries between these three categories are somewhat artificial, and in many cases, there is overlap or slippage between the different categories. Nonetheless, they provide an organizational structure for the chapter and thus for analysis of the relationship between language and politics more generally. Before we move to the first of them, however, it will be useful to define what politics itself means in this context.

Critical issues and topics Defining politics In the most general of terms, politics refers to the regulation of people’s lives which influences the way they interact with each other, along with the way that societies more broadly are organized. This regulation can be explicit (e.g. by means of policy) or implicit (e.g. via ideology). In this sense, politics is a product of the distribution of power, and the ways in which that power is used to create the structures which (attempt to) guide social relations. Within this general framework, Boswell (2020) suggests that politics has conventionally been understood as the theory and practice of how limited goods and resources come to be distributed in society by means of mechanisms, such as taxation and welfare. In other words, there is a particular materialist aspect to it, relating to the basics of human sustenance, well-being, and liberty. But practical concerns such as how we organize society exist alongside a battle of ideas about how we shape and represent our identity as communities and the values and beliefs that underpin this. Or rather, materialist issues exist in a symbiotic relationship with symbolic ones so that the power which can be used to regulate society is generated, in part, by trends in the beliefs and values of the members of that society so that the ways in which an issue is framed (and thus understood) will have an effect on how one approaches the distribution of material resources. The term ‘politics’ in everyday usage is often synonymous with electoral or party politics – that is, the world of professional politicians and the institutional structures that exist for the governance of society. But in a wider sense it is applied to the private and the public spheres, and in the last few decades, this has become increasingly part of public discourse with the rise in (discussions about) identity politics. It is a commonplace now to consider our personal lives and relationships as involving issues of power and to view them within the framework of power differentials. The roles people are assigned and enact in the family and the workplace; the expectations placed on them over norms of behaviour, dress, or speech – all of these constitute larger patterns of interpersonal organization which we refer to as society and which are 177

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sustained by relations of power between individuals and the groups in which they participate. In modern Western liberal democracies, many of these issues no longer fall directly under state control, and thus, they are not explicitly political in terms of institutional governance. This was not always the case, however, nor indeed is it the case in many other modern societies, where the state would and can regulate everything from what you were/are allowed to wear or consume (via sumptuary laws), what you were/are expected to believe (in terms of religious faith), and what you could/can say (in terms of restrictions on freedom of expression). Modern-day societies based on liberal ideals of individual human rights do not expect the state to explicitly interfere in these aspects of a person’s life, other than in certain exceptional circumstances (e.g. freedom-of-speech protections are balanced, in many societies, against legislation against hate speech). All the same, society as a whole, through the promotion and contestations of norms, still exerts forms of control over all these issues. The recognition of this has led to the development of a whole strand of critical scholarship (e.g. Foucault 1977, 1998; Bourdieu 1991) analyzing the ways in which relations of power can be seen to shape all social interaction and, therefore, suggesting that the flow of power is responsible for the very existence of society. Or to put it another way, without relations of power, we would not be able to collaborate, make mutual decisions, and get things achieved, and in this respect, politics is a fundamental part of everyday life.

How politics relates to applied linguistics The early-20th-century anarchist Voltairine De Cleyre wrote, Mankind invents a written sign to aid its intercommunication; and forthwith all manner of miracles are wrought with the sign. Even such a miracle as that of a part of the solid earth passes under the mastery of an impotent sheet of paper; and a distant bit of animated flesh which never even saw the ground, acquires the power to expel hundreds, thousands of like bits of flesh, though they grew upon that ground as the trees grow, labored it with their hands, and fertilized it with their bones for a thousand years. (2020: 199) This is a stark image of the political role played by language in imposing a set of regulations on a community. The physical presence of a written sign (a contract), which will complement a written declaration which has been signed and ratified by a governing body (a law), imposes sanctions on a variety of behaviours, including access to the land itself. Ownership of the land, within the social structure that governs the peoples of a community, is allocated to a particular person simply by dint of an assertion written on a piece of paper. The example given by De Cleyre here is a rather extreme (although by no means uncommon) instance of the process that the philosopher John Seale argues is the basis for social ontology. As he says, ‘all of institutional reality, and therefore, in a sense, all of human civilization, is created by speech acts that have the same logical form as Declarations . . . Institutional facts are without exception constituted by language’ (2010: 10–11). By ‘institutional facts’ Seale means precisely these communally agreed-upon (or forced) principles such as laws which govern our interaction within society – in De Cleyre’s example, the ownership of the piece of land. These institutional facts are articulated through language (by means of declarative speech acts) and then made real through our collective belief in them and our collective behaviour in respect of them. As with all speech acts, for a declaration to take on the status of an ‘institutional’ fact, it must be pronounced and recorded within a very 178

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specific set of contextual circumstances which relate, primarily, to structures of authority. In other words, while ‘institutional facts are . . . constituted by language’, they are backed up by other forms of institutional power, such as the police and prison systems. But language is nearly always the operating mechanism for this authority. The relationship between language and social ontology underpins the relationship between applied linguistics and politics, with applied linguistics tending to examine such language use at a fine-grained level, focusing, per the above definition, on real-world problems as these are experienced by people within their immediate environs. That’s to say, applied linguistics examines the way that social ontology functions in specific, context-based instances, paying particular attention to the various roles that language plays in such cases. There is something of an inevitable overlap with both sociolinguistics and discourse studies in this formulation. If we see sociolinguistics as focusing on the linguistic resources that people draw upon to make meaning, and we see discourse as the product of that meaning-making, we have a simple but integrated model for analyzing language in use. Conceptualized in this way, both sociolinguistics and discourse studies are broadly defined categories capable of incorporating the diverse language practices people use and encounter in social interaction and thus are of a part with the scope of study for applied linguistics and politics. In order to delimit this field for the purposes of this chapter, in the following section I will outline some of the traditional areas of investigation for applied linguistics which pertain particularly to issues of politics.

Historical and current perspectives Politics about language ‘Native speaker’ ideologies The rough divisions I have made in structuring this chapter are, as noted, politics about language, politics enacted through language, and the role played by language in electoral or institutional politics (what we might call Politics with a capital P). These are not hard and fast categories, but an initial definition of the first is ways in which beliefs about language or language use result in consequences for social practices and social structures which in turn depend upon and have consequences for relations of power between people and groups. The dividing line between historical and current perspectives can, at times, be difficult to pinpoint because many of the political issues that applied linguistics deals with today are ones which were first identified in the relatively early days of its emergence as a discipline and have then been the focus for extensive theorizing and research through subsequent decades. For instance, one of the major domains for applied linguistics research both historically and today is education. A focus on the ways that languages are taught, how language learning takes place, and how language education policies are formulated, debated, enacted, and received, along with other related topics, has led to a broad body of work in this area. To the extent that approaches to these subjects involve an examination of the contexts in which the education occurs and the implications learning has for both the individual and society, there is an important political element to all of this. Many of the major issues related to the politics of language education concern the linguistic ideologies – that’s to say, the embedded social beliefs about language and language use (Silverstein 1979; Woolard 1998) – which influence the practise of teaching and learning and the way these practises have an impact on social structures. One long-standing issue in this respect, which provides a good example of the many facets of the relationship between politics and applied linguistics, is the part that an ideology 179

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of the ‘native speaker’ has in foreign or second language education contexts. Within applied linguistics scholarship, this has been analyzed and critiqued from the 1990s onwards (e.g. Rampton 1990; Widdowson 1994), yet the ideology remains stubbornly prevalent in the policies and practice of many language-teaching institutions around the world and thus continues to have an impact on issues of social inequality. Controversies over this concept begin from the widely held belief, commonplace amongst the general public and many educational policy practitioners, that authentic use of and indeed knowledge of a language is to be found in those who acquired that language as a mother tongue. Given that such people’s use of the language has this perceived authentic status, a ‘native speaker’ variety is then considered the preferred model for those learning the language in any context other than as a mother tongue. (I am placing quotation marks around ‘native speaker’ to indicate the fact that it remains such a contested term, despite being widely used in non-academic and, occasionally, academic contexts.) This ideology then becomes reflected in curricula, teaching materials and in the aspirations of many learners, whose desire is to be able to speak like a ‘native speaker’ in terms of both lexicogrammatical competence and style (e.g. the imitation of a ‘native speaker’ accent). Furthermore, the fact that this preferred model for teaching is associated so completely with ‘native speakers’ can often privilege those who have the language as their mother tongue in the job market. Indeed, in some contexts, the criterion for being employed as a language teacher can rest entirely on one’s status as a ‘native speaker’, with little weight given to whether one has teaching qualifications or not (see, for example, the collected essays in Houghton and Rivers [2013] for how these various issues manifest in terms of the teaching and learning of English in Japan). The picture is further complicated in the case of a language such as English, which has multiple global varieties reflecting the history of its spread around the world and particularly the role played by colonialism and imperialism in this history. In English’s case, the concept of the ‘native speaker’, and all the decisions around policy and practice that flow from this, is often understood to refer to a particular type of ‘native speaker’ – namely, one from an ‘Inner Circle’ country (e.g. the US, the UK, Australia) who speaks an educated, standard version of that ‘Inner Circle’ variety. The overall picture, then, is of linguistic ideologies which are the product of historical, economic, and political events, creating a concept of the ‘native speaker’, which is then influential in the way the language is viewed within society, the way it is taught, and the various economic and political structures which comprise the language education system in different contexts. The linguistic ideologies which underpin the basic concept of the ‘native speaker’ are thus political from the very beginning in the way they conceptualize language use via the prism of hegemonic cultures. The practices which flow from this initial conceptualization then maintain and reinforce this hegemony through the promotion of the language practices of powerful groups and nations. Building on these basic premises, research, and theorizing in applied linguistics has done a great deal to analyze the motivation and influence of the ‘native speaker’ ideology, to critique the belief systems and practices which sustain it, and to attempt to reframe discussion around this with the use of an alternative descriptive vocabulary (e.g. phrases such as ‘expert user’; Rampton 1990).

The hegemony of global languages As noted, debates about the ‘native speaker’ in language education are often approached in terms of linguistic hegemony, particularly when applied to contexts such as the teaching of powerful global languages such as English. The historical spread of English and its contemporary dominance in the linguistic ecology of the world raises a great number of political issues 180

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and has led to a range of different theoretical approaches for addressing these. Simply to label the issue in terms of hegemony is, in fact, to take a political perspective on it and to view the role that the language plays in society as contributing to the power differential between one group and another. This sort of approach differs from that taken by governments and government-affiliated bodies for whom the promotion of the national language is seen as a desirable action that constitutes a form of soft political power. Organizations such as the British Council, L’Institut Français, and the Confucius Institutes thus have networks of international outposts, pursuing various initiatives to promote the language and culture of their homeland and, by doing so, extend their cultural influence on the global stage. An examination of such practices led to what has become one of the most influential critiques of the political motivations and implications behind government-backed language programmes: Robert Philipson’s concept of ‘linguistic imperialism’ (1992). This refers to the role that language and the organizations which promote a particular language play as part of broader processes of cultural imperialism, whereby a dominant power or powers (most noticeably the US and the UK in the current world system) use the cultural advantages afforded by the status that ‘their’ language plays in the world, to further political and economic aims. Although several decades old now, and not without its critics (e.g. Widdowson 1998), Phillipson’s work has prompted a great deal of subsequent research and theorizing into the way that language as both idea and cultural resource is used explicitly as a tool for international influence and how, as a consequence, ever greater divides develop between powerful ‘global’ languages and their speakers and ‘local’ languages and the speech communities which use them.

Politics enacted through language The second category, ‘politics enacted through language’, relates to the ways that choices over language use frame representations of social reality and thus have an effect on normative understandings of this reality. There are a number of different layered components to this. Firstly, there is the idea that choices pertaining to vocabulary and syntax can, within particular social or cultural contexts, frame perceptions of phenomena. This contention underpins discourse studies (and most notably critical discourse analysis [CDA]), and in turn is based around Foucauldian and neo-Marxist ideas concerning the ways that unequal distribution of power within society is sustained via discursive means. The use of a term such as the ‘national living wage’ by the UK government, for example, frames a minimum wage policy as a baseline for adequate subsistence, regardless of whether or not this is actually the case. There is also the metalinguistic contestation of framing: the way that these linguistic choices become the focus for debates about broader social issues, particularly those pertaining to social justice, so that contestation becomes a way of challenging and reframing norms. Debate about the validity of the term ‘national living wage’, for example, can act as a touchstone for a broader critical debate about the political and ethical responsibilities of the welfare state (livingwage.org 2021). What is noticeable in the era of social media is how this sort of critical analysis had moved beyond academic and policy research to become (albeit it in a far less rigorously analytical way) part of the everyday practice of online discussion and debate. On a platform such as Twitter, for instance, a form of grassroots or amateur CDA daily dissects and critiques the linguistic framing of political issues by public figures and news organizations, usually driven by the partisan beliefs of those carrying out the analysis. This brings us to a further level in the ways in which discursive and linguistic framing has political consequences, and this concerns the issue of who has access to and authority over the communicative resources which can be used to effect this politically consequential linguistic 181

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framing. The fundamental point here is that while it may indeed be the case that shaping the framing or narrative by which phenomena are represented – and, through this, by which the social world is ‘constructed’ – allows one to set the agenda on a particular topic, people do not have equal access to the communicative means by which this discursive framing can be achieved. Access to different linguistic varieties, registers, and genres, to different technologies and audiences, and to different platforms in terms of status and authority all feed into the real-world effects that acts of linguistic and discursive framing have on the shape of society. Language can also be the focus of political debate and action in other ways. The regulation of language – the regulation of what one can say and of how and when one can say it – is something that happens constantly in social life. For example, in many countries or states the notion of free speech is a central tenet of the nation’s political identity. In such communities, a citizen’s right to speak freely and without undue censorship is inscribed in the constitution or otherwise protected by law (e.g. ECHR 2013). This is a form of political sanction for a particular aspect of language use. Yet even in communities which see this idea as an essential aspect of their cultural identity, there are always proscriptions about what it is and is not acceptable to say. These proscriptions can either be explicit laws or they can be social and cultural norms (e.g. beliefs about what normally counts as bad or abusive language), but either way they act so that the individual’s language use continues to be regulated at some level at all times. Debates about this are mostly conducted in political philosophy (e.g. Garton Ash 2016), yet the fact that free speech legislation relates to actual language use rather than merely abstract principles means that it is a prime topic for applied linguistics. For example, a key tenet for freedom of expression protections is that limits should only be set on utterances which are likely to cause harm to an individual or group. How this harm is defined varies from country to country, but in the United States (which has the most liberal free speech laws in the world) it is understood as situations where the particular speech is likely to lead to immediate and specific harm to someone. In other words, you can only judge what the harm is likely to be based on the context in which the utterance is spoken. The same phrase uttered in different contexts is likely to have very different effects. Because of this, free speech protections tend towards being content-neutral but context-specific: it is not the words themselves which cause the harm but the way in which they are used. Given that close analysis of the way meaning-making is achieved in communicative interactions is at the centre of much applied sociolinguistic investigation, the discipline is thus well positioned to contribute to debates around and management of the politics of free speech.

Applied linguistics and electoral politics The final category, which is to some extent a subcategory of the above, is the applied linguistics of Politics with a capital P. The persuasive power of language is a fundamental part of the procedures by which liberal democracies work in that decision-making relies (albeit in highly complex ways) on consensus which is arrived at by open discussion. With this as a key principle underpinning the ideals of the liberal democratic system, there is a strong metadiscursive focus upon how the actual practices of political discourse conform to these ideals, with regular critiques in media and public conversations of instances which may threaten to undermine them. Once again, the dynamics of political persuasion is a fertile subject for applied linguistic analysis, particularly in terms of the way that the manipulation of language and discourse is used in attempting to achieve specific purposes within the context of electoral politics. Given how broad the range of such acts of political persuasion is, I will only offer one example here. The concept of fake news, as this involves the generating and circulating of purposely 182

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fabricated stories made to resemble real news and shared for propagandistic purposes, became a salient feature of political discourse from the mid-2010s onwards to the extent that it was one of the defining notions for the era of global politics which emerged a few years after the global financial crash of 2008. Although the general phenomenon to which the term refers has been a part of the media ecosystem almost since the first development of the newspaper (and in different guises, much earlier than that), a combination of digital media affordances and a rise in a specific style of political communication that was particularly associated with populist movements produced a distinct form of this age-old phenomenon in the second decade of the 21st century. Alongside the emergence of this concept of ‘fake news’, however, came a related but distinct discourse of ‘fake news’, centred around the term itself, operating in its own right as a form of propaganda. A starting point for an analysis of this issue is Nietzsche’s contention, expressed in the Genealogy of Morals (2013 [1887]), that concepts that have histories cannot have definitions. To understand the meaning of the term ‘fake news’ as it occurs in political and media discourse, it is necessary to examine who has used it, when, and for what purposes and how an intertextual pattern based on such usage, particularly as this has been represented within the media, has then emerged. In other words, to investigate the role played by use of the term one needs to examine it as part of a broader discourse – one which communicates extreme scepticism towards institutional news media outlets – and to provide close, context-based analysis of the rhetorical aims and effects for which it is being used in any given scenario. There are a variety of methodologies one can use for such analysis, from corpus linguistics to narrative-focused discourse analysis to forms of linguistic ethnography. But the important point here is that, while a topic such as ‘fake news’ has most readily been addressed by disciplines such as media and journalism studies (e.g. Zimdars and McLeod 2020), the pivotal role that language plays, particularly in the propagandistic mobilization of the term itself, means that applied linguistics is well positioned to contribute to an understanding of this aspect of the politics of disinformation. As the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter (1942: 283) wrote in the midst of the Second World War, ‘The psychotechnics of party management and party advertising, slogans and marching tunes, are not accessories. They are of the essence of politics.’ This is even more true now than it was when Schumpeter was writing, and thus, the analysis of the relationship between the manipulation of linguistic and semiotic resources and the governing of society is at the very heart of understanding modern Politics.

Future directions The most significant way in which issues of communication – and thus, by extension, applied linguistics – are evolving is due to the influence of rapidly changing technology. Developments in technology, and particularly digital technologies, are influencing both how language is used and how it is studied. With respect to the former, the influence of social media and artificial intelligence (AI) are altering the scope, speed, and nature of communicative possibilities, as well as the forms of interface and mediation we use when interacting (Seargeant and Tagg 2014; Gunkel 2020). With respect to the latter, the various applications of computer-facilitated processing and analyzing of data – as, for example, in corpus linguistic approaches – are providing multiple new ways of studying language structure and language use. How, then, does this apply specifically to the study of politics and language within the context of applied linguistics? There are various political issues associated with the relationship between language and new technologies. These include the ownership, and thus influence, of the tech companies which monopolize much of the online world, including the platforms and 183

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spaces in which people interact, the resources they use to communicate, and the way these resources are designed and regulated. For example, one of the implications of the integration of AI into the platforms which dominate modern communication is that interactions between human agents are increasingly co-created with the algorithms which power the platforms (Jones 2021). The workings of these algorithms inevitably reflect the values and ideologies of their designers to some extent (Noble 2018), meaning that they mostly promote the political values, not to mention the biases, of those working in the tech industry on the west coast of the USA. One example of this is the way that in 2021 Google introduced technology for its Google Docs app, which suggests edits for language which is considered non-inclusive according to current liberal democratic social norms. For instance, should one type ‘mailman’, it will suggest instead ‘mail carrier’, or for ‘chairman’, it will suggest ‘chairperson’ (Condon 2021). At the other end of the interventionist scale, social media apps in mainland China are subject to a variety of speech-related restrictions implemented via keyword filtering (Stockmann 2014), which thus complicate the ability for people to discuss a number of proscribed topics. An analysis of individuals’ language use on platforms which use this type of filtering or nudge technology thus becomes an investigation into how discourse is shaped by a mixture of human agency, AI, and the political context in which the tech industry operates. This alters many conventional understandings about the nature of expression and interaction and creates new challenges for applied linguistics research. In conclusion, it is worth, perhaps, adding a note about one further category – namely, the politics of the institutions in which applied linguistics as a discipline or subject area is researched and taught. This is part of the issue of the politics of higher education more generally and, as such, concerns all disciplines and subject areas. But given the importance that ideology and discourse play in shaping political culture, it is an issue which applied linguists may feel they have a particular sensitivity towards. The work of researching, teaching, and learning about applied linguistics issues takes place in institutional contexts which themselves are run according to a set of political and economic beliefs and which also act as sites of struggle over the validity, consequence, and meaning of these belief systems. As such, even when the knowledge produced and disseminated does not directly concern these politics, it is likely nonetheless to be partly shaped in relation to them. The types of issues this entails includes the following: the distribution of resources and opportunities available to researchers, teachers, and students for gaining access to and participating in the production of and dialogue over knowledge; the way knowledge production is shaped by the priorities and/or biases of those who have control over this distribution of resources; and the way the same is shaped by cultural and historical processes (not least among these being the dominance of the English language in the contemporary global context) and by political agendas and the subsequent political decisions taken at a state level which then affect the ethos behind the running of higher education institutions. The knowledge which becomes the applied linguistics canon or curriculum is thus the product of individuals and groups working in contexts which have been facilitated or constrained by this system. In recent years, one of the most salient ways in which reflection about this aspect of the relationship between academia and politics has been taking place is with campaigns centred around the concept of decolonizing the curriculum. To an extent, certain parts of applied linguistics have, since their inception, emerged specifically to pursue goals akin to those of the decolonizing the curriculum movement. The various strands of study focusing on English around the world, for instance, have, since the 1980s at least, aimed to challenge Western-centric histories of the English language, and both provide conceptual models which legitimize diversity and variety and to be inclusive of local perspectives from around the world. In addition, from the 184

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late 1990s onwards, branches of applied linguistics have engaged extensively with theorization around the processes of globalization (e.g. Blommaert 2012), leading to research areas such as those on language and superdiversity (Blommaert and Rampton 2011) and translanguaging (Li Wei 2018), all of which look to deconstruct static, nation-based notions of language. This is not to say that there is not more productive work to be done in this area. Given the role that language plays in shaping the life opportunities of people, as well as its role in representing the cultural values of a society, reflection about how we generate disciplinary knowledge should be part and parcel of that disciplinary knowledge. Because applied linguistics work often feeds directly into language-related social practices – into teaching, for example, or assessment design – it is important that the critical approach that scholarship takes to the political effects of such practices is matched by a critical approach to the way the research itself is carried out – and this is likely to continue to be an increasingly important issue in the ongoing development of the discipline.

Related topics language and migration; language policy and planning; critical discourse analysis; language, race, and ethnicity; world Englishes and English as a lingua franca; digital language and communication

Further reading Hewings, A. and Tagg, C. (eds.) (2012) The Politics of English: Conflict, Competition, Co-Existence, Abingdon: Routledge. (This textbook examines the relationships between English and politics, with a focus on the status of English as a global language and its relationship to issues such as migration, the media, and the global ELT industry.) Kramsch, C. (2021) Language as Symbolic Power, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (An overview of the relationship between language and power as this is manifest in contexts such as education, politics, and culture.) Seargeant, P. (2020) The Art of Political Storytelling: Why Stories Win Votes in Post-Truth Politics, London: Bloomsbury. (This book looks at the fundamental role that narrative plays in political persuasion and how language is used to frame political messages.)

References Blommaert, J. (2012) The Sociolinguistics of Globalization, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blommaert, J. and Rampton, B. (2011) ‘Language and superdiversity’, Diversities, 13(2): 1–21. Boswell, C. (2020) ‘What is politics?’, British Academy, 14 January. www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/blog/ what-is-politics/ Bourdieu, P. (1991) Language and Symbolic Power (translated by G. Raymond and M. Adamson; edited by J. B. Thompson), Cambridge: Polity. Brumfit, C. (1995) ‘Teacher professionalism and research’, in G. Cook and B. Seidlhofer (eds.), Principle and Practice in Applied Linguistics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 27–42. Chomsky, N. (2000) New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Condon, S. (2021) ‘Google I/O 2021: Workspace wants to improve your writing’, ZDNet, 18 May. www. zdnet.com/article/google-io-workspace-wants-to-help-improve-your-writing/ (accessed 24 June 2021). Davis, J. L. (2020) (@ChickashaJenny) ‘It’s still amazing to me how . . .’, 10 September, 7: 18 p.m, tweet. https://twitter.com/ChickashaJenny/status/1304122057458933760?s=20 De Cleyre, V. (2020) Selected Works of Voltairine de Cleyre (edited by A. Berkman), Frankfurt: Outlook Verlag. 185

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Delgado, R. and Stefancic, J. (2017) Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, 3rd ed., New York: New York Press. ECHR (2013) European Convention on Human Rights. www.echr.coe.int/documents/convention_eng. pdf (accessed 24 June 2021). Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Foucault, M. (1998) The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: The Will to Knowledge, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Garton Ash, T. (2016) Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Gunkel, D. J. (2020) An Introduction to Communication and Artificial Intelligence, Cambridge: Polity. Houghton, S. A. and Rivers, D. J. (eds.) (2013) Native-Speakerism in Japan: Intergroup Dynamics in Foreign Language Education, Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Jones, R. H. (2021) ‘The text is reading you: Teaching language in the age of the algorithm’, Language in Education, 62. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.linged.2019.100750 livingwage.org (2021) What is the real living wage? www.livingwage.org.uk (accessed 24 June 2021). Li Wei (2018) ‘Translanguaging as a practical theory of language’, Applied Linguistics, 39(1): 9–30. Lukin, A. (2011) ‘The paradox of Noam Chomsky on language and power’, The Conversation, 14 November. https://theconversation.com/the-paradox-of-noam-chomsky-on-language-and-power-4174 (accessed 24 June 2021). Nietzsche, F. (2013 [1887]) On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic (translated by M. A. Scarpitti), London: Penguin. Noble, S. (2018) Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, New York: NYU Press. Pennycook, A. (2001) Critical Applied Linguistics: A Critical Introduction, Abingdon: Routledge. Phillipson, R. (1992) Linguistic Imperialism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rampton, M. B. H. (1990) ‘Displacing the “native speaker”: Expertise, affiliation, and inheritance’, ELT Journal, 44(2): 97–101. Schumpeter, J. A. (1942) Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, New York: Harper and Brothers. Seargeant, P. and Tagg, C. (eds.) (2014) The Language of Social Media: Identity and Community on the Internet, London: Palgrave. Searle, J. R. (2010) Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Silverstein, M. (1979) ‘Language structure and linguistic ideology’, in P. R. Clyne, W. F. Hanks and C. L. Hofbauer (eds.), The Elements: A Parasession on Linguistic Units and Levels, Chicago, IL: Chicago Linguistic Society. Stockmann, D. (2014) Media Commercialization and Authoritarian Rule in China, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Widdowson, H. G. (1994) ‘The ownership of English’, TESOL Quarterly, 28(2): 377–389. Widdowson, H. G. (1998) ‘EIL: Squaring the circles: A reply’, World Englishes, 17(3): 397–401. Woolard, K. A. (1998) ‘Introduction: Language ideology as a field of inquiry’, in B. B. Schieffelin, K. A. Woolard, and P. Kroskrity (eds.), Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 1–50. Zimdars, M. and McLeod, K. (2020) Fake News: Understanding Media and Misinformation in the Digital Age, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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15 World Englishes and English as a lingua franca Andy Kirkpatrick and David Deterding

Introduction This chapter begins by reviewing the development of World Englishes as a field of study. First, in showing that there are many Englishes, not just one, the work of Braj Kachru is described and the importance of his contributions is summarized. Next, debates concerning the motivations for language change in World Englishes are reviewed and examples of innovative linguistic features are provided. Then we consider the developmental stages in the emergence of World Englishes. Finally, we discuss recent developments, including the rapidly increasing role throughout the world of English as a lingua franca (ELF), and we summarize how World Englishes and ELF differ.

Models of World Englishes There have been many models that represent the nature of Englishes around the world. These are summarized in McArthur (1998), where McArthur’s own ‘Circle of World Englishes’ is also described (1998: 97). Perhaps the most influential model is Kachru’s three circles of English. It also uses a circle analogy, placing each country in one of three circles as follows (with country examples added in italicized brackets): The current sociolinguistic profile of English may be viewed in terms of three concentric circles . . . The Inner Circle refers to the traditional cultural and linguistic bases of English (e.g. Britain, USA, Australia). The Outer Circle represents the institutionalized non-native varieties (ESL) in the regions that have passed through extended periods of colonization (e.g. Singapore, India, Nigeria). The Expanding Circle includes the regions where the performance varieties of the language are used essentially in EFL contexts (e.g. China, Japan, Egypt). (Kachru 1992b: 356–357) The terms ESL (English as a second language) and EFL (English as a foreign language) in this extract refer to the traditional classification which Kachru challenged. His great contribution DOI: 10.4324/9781003082637-17

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to the field lay in recognizing the development of many different varieties of English, so the language should not be seen in terms of a single monolithic standard, as variation is the norm. And just as there are many varieties of British English, there are also many World Englishes, which in turn have sub-varieties, so, for example, Indian English consists of a network of varieties (Wiltshire 2020). Some scholars have criticized aspects of the ‘three circles’ model on the following grounds: it is historically and geographically based, it deals with countries rather than societies or individuals, and it fails to accommodate some places (such as Denmark and Argentina) that seem to be moving from Expanding Circle to Outer Circle status even though they were never colonies of England or the United States (Jenkins 2009: 20). Furthermore, Kachru’s model does not allow for the possibility of the increasing number of speakers with English as their first language in places such as Singapore and India. However, as Bolton (2005) has noted, Kachru’s ‘three circles’ model was formulated in response to the single-standard orthodoxy of the time, and ‘the strength of the World Englishes paradigm has lain and continues to lie in its consistent pluralism and inclusivity’ (2005: 78). Here, we survey linguistic studies of World Englishes and provide examples of features from a range of Englishes. Then we consider the stages through which New Englishes progress as they develop into mature varieties.

Linguistic motivations A fundamental principle in the study of World Englishes is that variation and change are natural and inevitable (Kirkpatrick 2007). As a consequence, linguistic features which differ from Standard English are not errors but may instead represent features of a World English. Linguistic variation is, of course, nothing new, and Inner Circle Englishes, as well as World Englishes, are characterized by variation not just in pronunciation and vocabulary but grammar as well. For example, historically, all Englishes had a rich set of present tense inflections on verbs, but the dialects of England now generally have substantially reduced inflections, and furthermore, they are not the same in all varieties. In modern Standard English, for present tense verbs, there is only the -s ending for the third person singular, but the dialect of East Anglia generally has no present tense inflections at all, so ‘he make them’ is grammatical in this variety, though Britain (2020) suggests it may be moving towards the standard in this respect. In contrast, Yorkshire English has an additional present tense inflection, with ‘thou hast’ for second person singular. Variation in present tense marking is also seen in American dialects. ‘Folks sings’ is grammatical in the English of the American South (Bailey 1997: 259–260), and the following extract of African American Vernacular English shows variation in the use of -s on verbs: What’s her, what’s her name that cooks them? She a real young girl. She bring ’em in every morning. An’ they, an’ they sells ’em, an’ they sells them for that girl there in that store. (Cukor-Avila 2003: 98) Given such variation in Inner Circle Englishes, it is not surprising to find similar variation in World Englishes. In Kortmann et al. (2004), half of the 46 varieties of English surveyed frequently do not mark the third person singular -s. Mesthrie and Bhatt (2008) compared a selection of World Englishes and identified grammatical features which occur in many varieties but not in Standard English. They propose that World Englishes can be classified as either ‘deleters’ or ‘preservers’ (2008: 90–92). Deleters 188

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are varieties whose speakers commonly leave out grammatical elements, while preservers are those in which deletion is less common, with Singapore English an example of a deleting variety and Black South African English a preserver. Their explanation for this distinction between deleters and preservers involves influence from other languages, as it is ‘usually dependent on the characteristic syntax of the substrate languages’ (2008: 90). Although language contact has always been a key stimulus for linguistic change, a number of shared grammatical features have been identified. In fact, the large number of non-standard forms which are shared by many new varieties of English has led some scholars to propose that a number of vernacular universals (VUs) exist, as these cannot be solely due to influence from the speakers’ first languages. Assuming that language contacts are a factor to be reckoned with when dealing with VUs, the question is: what exactly is the relationship between language contact phenomena and vernacular universals, and to what extent can we distinguish them from each other? (Filpulla et al. 2009: 8) The debate over the relative importance of a speaker’s first language (the substrate) upon a particular variety of English continues, but it is evident that the substrate is not the only motivation for change, and grammatical simplification and regularization are also motivations for change. In the next section, we provide a sample of linguistic features from a range of World Englishes.

Linguistic features: some examples Kortmann and Lunkenheimer (2013) provide a substantial catalogue of grammatical variation across 46 different varieties of English. Here, we discuss a small selection of features, focusing particularly on a few that are shared widely among World Englishes. In addition, we consider which of these features also occur in Inner Circle varieties, and the extent to which they might be reflecting the evolution of English. We start with some phonological features that seem to occur in a range of World Englishes: avoidance of dental fricatives, reduction of final consonant clusters, use of syllable-based rhythm, and spelling pronunciation. Next, we consider how World Englishes borrow words from local languages so that these Englishes reflect the lived experiences of their speakers. We then give some examples of morphosyntactic features, involving the inflections that occur on verbs and nouns. Finally, we discuss the discourse feature of topic fronting.

Phonological features Dental fricatives One of the most widespread features of World Englishes is the tendency to avoid the use of [θ]  and [ð] for the TH sounds. However, the sounds that occur instead of these dental fricatives vary. For example, for the voiceless TH sound at the start of a word such as three, [t] tends to occur in places such as Singapore (Deterding 2007: 13–16), Malaysia (Baskaran 2004), the Philippines (Tayao 2004), Brunei (Mossop 1996), Ghana (Huber 2004), the Bahamas (Childs and Wolfram 2004), and India (Kachru 2005: 44–46), while [f] occurs in Hong Kong English (Deterding et al. 2008), and Gut (2004) reports that, in Nigerian English, Hausa speakers tend to use [s] but Yoruba and Igbo speakers use [t]. The avoidance of dental fricatives also occurs in some Inner Circle Englishes, as at the start of a word such as three, many speakers in London 189

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use [f], while those in Ireland and also New York may use [t] or [t̪ ] (Wells 1982: 328, 428, 515), but this phenomenon is almost certainly more widespread in New Englishes. Jenkins (2000: 159) excludes dental fricatives from her lingua franca core (LFC), the features that she suggests are vital for the intelligibility of English as an international language. In fact, they are the only sounds from the inventory of consonants found in Inner Circle Englishes that are excluded from the LFC. One might hypothesize that, in the future, the absence of dental fricatives may become increasingly accepted in standard Englishes.

Final consonant clusters Word-final consonant clusters are commonly simplified in World Englishes, often involving the omission of the final consonant, especially if it is a plosive. For example, in Singapore English, first, world, ask, and think may all be pronounced with the final consonant omitted (Deterding 2007: 18). Final consonant cluster reduction is similarly reported for many other New Englishes, including those of Hong Kong (Deterding et al. 2008), Nigeria (Gut 2004), Ghana (Huber 2004), and East Africa (Schmied 2004). The omission of plosives from the end of word-final consonant clusters is also frequent in Inner Circle varieties. Cruttenden (2014: 314) offers a long list of phrases in RP (the variety of British English that is usually adopted as the standard) from which [t] or [d] at the end of the first word is omitted, including next day, raced back, last chance, first light, old man, and loved flowers, and Guy (1980) reports that the phenomenon is particularly common among speakers of vernacular Black English in the USA. Perhaps the biggest difference is that in New Englishes the omission of the final consonant tends to persist even when the next word begins with a vowel, an environment in which the consonant is more likely to be used for linking in Inner Circle varieties. Schreier (2005: 27) suggests that consonant cluster reduction may be a universal property of all varieties of spoken English and, furthermore, that this natural tendency towards simplification characterizes the historical development of English. It seems, then, that New Englishes may be leading the way in reducing the complexity of syllables by omitting the final consonant in word-final clusters.

Rhythm While stress-based rhythm is often claimed to be the basis of English speech timing in most Inner Circle varieties, the use of syllable-based rhythm is widely reported for New Englishes. Although nowadays few people adhere to the view of Abercrombie (1967: 97) that all languages can be neatly classified as either stress-timed or syllable-timed, and indeed, some scholars have questioned the entire existence of this fundamental rhythmic dichotomy (e.g. Cauldwell 2002), it is often still asserted that languages may be placed along a continuum of stress-/syllable-timing (Dauer 1983). Indeed, measurements that compare the duration of the vowels in neighbouring syllables confirm that a clear acoustic difference can be shown between the rhythm of Singapore and British English (Low et al. 2000), though the best way of measuring rhythm remains uncertain (Deterding 2012; Fuchs 2016). In addition to Singapore English, other new varieties that have been observed to have a syllable-based rhythm include those of the Philippines (Tayao 2004), India (Fuchs 2016), Nigeria (Gut 2006), East Africa (Schmied 2004), and Jamaica (Trudgill and Hannah 2008: 117). In fact, British English can also sometimes have variable rhythm, and Crystal (1995) observes that 190

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syllable-based rhythm can be found in a range of speech styles, including baby talk, sarcastic utterances, many types of popular music, and some television commercials. Given the widespread occurrence of syllable-based rhythm throughout the world, it seems that this is another candidate for a feature where New Englishes may be leading the way for the evolution of English.

Spelling pronunciation As more and more people become literate, there is a tendency for the pronunciation of words to be influenced by their spelling (Deterding and Nur Raihan 2016). This affects all Englishes, so in Britain forehead was once [fɒrɪd] (it rhymed with horrid), but it is now usually [fɔːhed].  However, this process seems to be particularly common in World Englishes, so salmon is generally [sælmɒn] in Brunei English (Deterding and Salbrina 2013: 41) and throughout Southeast  Asia, and about half of university undergraduates in Brunei have [ɒ] rather than [ʌ] in the first  syllable of company (Deterding and Salbrina 2013: 40). The influence of spelling on pronunciation may be yet one more area where World Englishes are leading the changes that are affecting English worldwide.

Lexical features World Englishes are spoken by people who share cultural and linguistic backgrounds, and by definition, their speakers are multilingual, so they typically use words borrowed from their other languages (Kirkpatrick 2020a). Borrowing can, of course, also be seen with Inner Circle varieties, as kangaroo, koala, and boomerang are all borrowed into Australian English from Australian Aboriginal languages, while in an Outer Circle variety, Malay words such as kampong (village) and sarong (a wrap-around garment) are found in Malaysian English. Names of foods are common sources of borrowed vocabulary, so nasi goreng (fried rice) and ambuyat (a dessert made from sago) are common words in Brunei English (Deterding and Salbrina 2013: 95). Indeed, new words constantly enter all varieties of English. The Oxford English Dictionary (2018 edition) has a number of entries originating from Filipino English, including bagoong (a condiment made from fermented fish), holdupper (someone who commits a robbery or holdup), and trapo (a corrupt politician). The etymology of trapo provides an excellent example of how new words are created. It is formed from the first letters of traditional politician, but is also an allusion to trapo, the Spanish word for rag, a reminder that the Philippines was a Spanish colony until 1898. World Englishes also create hybrid words, combinations of a local language and English. Examples from Indian English include lathi-charge (Indian police carry lathis or batons) and tiffin carrier (a lunch container) (Kachru 1983: 38). Speakers of World Englishes often display humour and creativity in the development of new words. For example, ‘New Chinglish’ sometimes splices two English words together to create portmanteaus: democrazy mocks the democratic system of the West and became prominent after Trump’s presidential election, shitizen describes how ordinary people feel about their status in Chinese society, smilence refers to a typical Chinese reaction of smiling without saying anything, propoorty alludes to the mounting costs of owning property in China, and profartssor indicates the lack of integrity of some Chinese professors (Lee and Li 2020). Chinese speakers also use direct translations of Chinese utterances. For example, the direct English translation of 你问 我 我问谁? (Ni wen wo, wo wen shei?)’ is ‘You ask me, I ask who?’ and means, in this 191

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variety of English, ‘I have no idea.’ As Lee and Li point out, this multilingual creativity ‘can be said to be immanent in the concept of translanguaging, the creative and critical deployment of semiotic resources in communication that transcends normative boundaries between named languages’ (2020: 558).

Morphosyntactic features As discussed, the absence of the present tense -s inflection is reported in many Englishes. In addition, many speakers of World Englishes see no need to mark the past tense of verbs once the time frame of an event has been established. For Singapore English, Deterding (2007) suggests that use of the present tense in narrating an event is particularly common when dealing with something that may still be true. For example, in the following extract, the speaker switches to the present tense, even though the story is located in the past, possibly because she believes that the funfair is still running at the time she is speaking: [T]hen later on in the evening . . . er went to the UK funfair . . . at Jurong East . . . mmm . . . it was, it was interesting, but very expensive . . . erm the fun, the entrance fee is cheap, it’s only two dollars . . . I guess that’s cheap enough, but then the . . . the games and the rides are all very expensive. (Deterding 2007: 46) Another factor that may influence the use of tenses in Singapore English is the nature of the verb, as Ho and Platt (1993: 86) show that past tense marking is most common for punctual verbs (i.e. verbs such as hit or give that describe an action, in contrast with stative verbs such as like or want). Could absence of past tense marking for narrating an event become widely accepted as part of Standard English? In fact, the historic present is already sometimes used for narrating past events in order to create a sense of immediacy. Carter and McCarthy (2006: 625) give the following example from their corpus of spoken British English, where the speaker is talking about a laser show: In the beginning there was darkness, and we hear this scraping sound, and you see this little coloured pattern, the coloured pattern gets bigger and bigger. The non-use of the present tense -s is also attested in many varieties of World English. However, it may not be as frequent as people have previously assumed. The existence of corpora, including corpora of ELF, has allowed scholars to investigate the actual frequency of nonstandard forms. And while the non-use of the present tense -s is attested in the Vienna Oxford International Corpus of English (VOICE) (Breiteneder 2005), it is relatively uncommon in the Asian Corpus of English (ACE). For example, Kirkpatrick and Subhan (2014) found that the non-marking of the present tense -s was rare in the formal speech of first language speakers of Malay and Bahasa Indonesia (languages that do not mark tense), and even in informal speech, it was less frequent than the use of the marked form. Similar results have been found for nouns which are uncountable in Inner Circle Englishes (e.g. furniture) but may be countable in World Englishes (Hall et al. 2013; Kirkpatrick 2020b). Researchers must therefore be careful not to treat what might only be occasional uses of nonstandard forms in World Englishes as characteristic features (Van Rooy 2013). These findings also question the influence of the substrate on a speaker’s variety of English. 192

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Discourse features Many scholars have noted that in certain World Englishes, the topic tends to be placed clearly at the front of the sentence. For example, in Singapore English, the recording in Deterding (2007: 63) includes the following utterances: So the whole process I need to break down for the different operators. Australia, I’ve been to Sydney and Perth. For Indian English, Bhatt (2004: 1023) offers: Those people, I telephoned yesterday only. Sometimes, topic fronting is followed by a resumptive pronoun, as in the following example from Singapore English (Deterding 2007: 65): Then, er, two of my sisters, they’re already married. What about Inner Circle varieties? Carter and McCarthy (2006: 193) suggest that fronting is common in spoken language, and they give the following examples: That leather coat, it looks really nice on you. The white house on the corner, is that where she lives? So perhaps the use of fronted topics, often with a resumptive pronoun, is actually a universal feature of all Englishes. Topic fronting seems to be a natural process in human language, and perhaps its widespread occurrence in World Englishes may have a substantial influence on the discourse structures that become increasingly favoured and accepted as mainstream in World Englishes.

General trends in linguistic features One characteristic of many shared features is that they are the result of simplification or regularization. For example, many speakers find dental fricatives hard to pronounce, so their avoidance makes things easier; and use of plurals for logically plural nouns makes the grammar more regular. Simplifying and regularizing innovations are ones that have a good chance of becoming adopted as standard when a language evolves, and we suggest that World Englishes may be leading the way in this respect. Figure 15.1 shows a sign written in Singapore in which close is used rather than the standard closed. At first glance, one is tempted to classify this as an error, as a suffix has not been added to the verb close to convert it into an adjective. But we might note that open can function perfectly well as both a verb and an adjective, and ‘we are open’ would be fine. So why not ‘we are close’? In fact, we can regard this use of close rather than closed as illustrating both simplification (it is easier to say, as the word-final consonant cluster is avoided) and also regularization (it is consistent with the use of open). And this is just the kind of change that we might expect to find adopted in Standard English one day. Perhaps this Singaporean signwriter is ahead of their time. And maybe many of the trends that have been noted for World Englishes indicate the future direction of global English. 193

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Figure 15.1 Sign on the door of a shop in Singapore (picture by Ludwig Tan)

Stages in the development of World Englishes So far, we have summarized some linguistic features in World Englishes. We now consider the stages that a variety of English goes through on its way to becoming accepted as the standard variety in a society. Kachru (1992a: 56) suggested that World Englishes pass through three stages. The first is marked by non-acceptance of the emerging variety, with locals preferring the colonial or relevant Inner Circle variety. The second stage sees local and imported varieties existing side-by-side. Finally, the local variety becomes accepted as the standard. Schneider (2007, 2020) has refined and extended this in his model of the evolution of Englishes, showing that post-colonial varieties of English often follow the same basic developmental path. He identifies five stages in the developmental cycle (2020: 417): 1 2 3

4 5

Foundation: English first arrives in the area. Exonormative stabilization: Standards are provided by the colonial variety. British English originally provided the norms in many colonies. Nativization: Bilingual and multilingual speakers create a new local variety of English which is influenced by the linguistic systems and cultural norms of the speakers’ first languages. During this stage, the new variety is usually considered deficient, so norms are still provided by the colonial variety, especially in the classroom. Endonormative stabilization: The new variety becomes socially accepted and provides the classroom model. In Kachru’s terms, this is when Outer Circle varieties become normproviding rather than norm-dependent. Differentiation: The new variety itself develops sub-varieties.

While more research is needed on the development of individual varieties, Schneider’s model appears fundamentally sound. However, the extent to which the local educated variety is 194

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accepted as the classroom model remains the topic of debate, with many Asian countries still insisting on an Inner Circle variety as the preferred model (Kirkpatrick forthcoming). It would appear, therefore, that varieties of English can reach Schneider’s final stage of differentiation linguistically, but sociolinguistically they remain at an earlier stage as language planners are not prepared to accept local varieties as classroom models. World Englishes have also given rise to literature written in the variety. There are many Asian and African writers who now use local varieties of English to represent their cultures. The Pakistani novelist Sidhwa writes, We have to stretch the language to adapt it to alien thoughts and values which have no precedent of expression in English, subject the language to a pressure that distorts, or if you like, enlarges its scope and changes its shape. (Sidhwa 1996: 240) An excellent example of this is Ken Saro-Wiwa’s (1985) novel Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English. The author’s note explains that Sozaboy (soldier boy) was the result of his fascination with how English could be adapted to reflect the language of Nigerians. The way a World English is transplanted and adapted by its new users is nicely captured in Indian English, which is characterized by its bookishness and use of extended metaphor: Years ago, a slender sapling from a foreign field was grafted by ‘pale hands’ on the mighty and many-branched Indian banyan tree. It has kept growing vigorously and is now an organic part of its parent tree, it has spread its own probing roots into the brown soil below. Its young leaves rustle energetically in the strong winds that blow from the western horizon, but the sunshine that warms it and the rain that cools it are from Indian skies; and it continues to draw its vital sap from ‘this earth, this realm’, this India. (Naik and Narayan 2004: 253)

English as a lingua franca (ELF) Nowadays, there are more users of English as an additional language than native speakers (Crystal 2003), and English as a lingua franca (ELF) is the most common worldwide use of the language (Jenkins 2009). Some have defined ELF to exclude native speakers (e.g. Firth 1990), but we follow Seidlhofer (2011: 7) that ELF is ‘any use of English among speakers of different first languages for whom English is the communicative medium of choice’, which may include some native speakers. A key distinction between ELF and World Englishes is that the latter are spoken by people who share linguistic and cultural backgrounds and reflect the lived experiences of their speakers, including words borrowed from local languages in order to express cultural phenomena (Baker 2016), while ELF occurs with speakers from different backgrounds. As a result, World Englishes are generally code-mixed varieties as their speakers make free use of their shared languages (McLellan 2020), as in this example of Singapore English, in which non-English words are underlined. Pulau Ubin zuo mo? makan seafood or phatoh? Emails he takes like 2 days later. Then when I reply to ask further, lagi 2 days gone. Merng so much of bun tuay, but neh cor-mit if can make it for sebben Low-vember also. (Cavallero et al. 2020: 422) 195

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Why Pulau Ubin? Is he there for seafood or a date? He takes two days to answer his emails and when I replied with more questions, another two days go by. He asked so many questions but still is unable to commit to the 7th November date. (Translation by Cavallero et al.) In contrast, ELF users tend to avoid words from other languages that might hinder communication, though they do sometimes code-mix (e.g. Cogo 2016). In ELF data, however, code-mixing is less frequent in ACE (ACE n.d.) than in VOICE (VOICE n.d.), partly because the contributors to ACE are speakers of Asian languages which often come from different language families. Furthermore, Asians tend not to learn other Asian languages at school (Kirkpatrick and Liddicoat 2019), while many contributors to VOICE are Europeans who will also have learned another European language, so there are more opportunities to use each other’s languages. While ELF may have a monolingual surface form, it is still inherently multilingual (SchallerSchwaner and Kirkpatrick 2020). Indeed, ELF users sometimes ‘translate’ an idiom from their own language into English. Pitzl (2016) quotes a German speaker saying, ‘I think in that case, we should not wake up any dogs’, adopting a German idiom translated into English. A second key distinction between World Englishes and ELF is that the former can be codified, such as Kachru (1983) for Indian English and the individual chapters in Kirkpatrick (2020b). In contrast, ELF cannot easily be codified. The fact that ELF interactions involve people from a range of cultural and linguistic backgrounds means that ELF is ‘inherently hybrid in nature’ (Firth 2009: 163). One might say it is a way of ‘doing English with other languages in (the back of) one’s mind and in a specific setting’ (Schaller-Schwaner and Kirkpatrick 2020: 234). Recent research into ELF has focused on strategies that users adopt to facilitate communication (Deterding and Kirkpatrick 2006; Bjorkman 2011; Vettorel 2019; Kirkpatrick and Schaller-Schwaner forthcoming) and to repair misunderstandings (Deterding 2013). Many scholars have noted ‘the supportive and cooperative nature of interactions in ELF where meaning negotiation takes place at different levels’ (Archibald et al. 2011: 3), though ELF interactions are not always cooperative, especially in high-stakes encounters (Kirkpatrick et al. 2016).

Key questions and issues We have outlined how recent work has created fields of study under World Englishes, and we have summarized some of the findings. However, much needs to be done – to codify the key features of varieties of World English, to analyze the extent to which they are used by different speakers, to determine trends in the evolution of English around the world, to consider the occurrence of and constraints on code-mixing, to identify shared features that may be classified as vernacular universals, and to examine how usage differs from that of ELF. In reality, research on World Englishes is still in its infancy, and there are exciting prospects for further work.

Related topics multilingualism; language and migration; language policy and planning

Further reading Jenkins, J., Baker, W. and Dewey, M. (eds.) (2020) The Routledge Handbook of English as a Lingua Franca, London and New York: Routledge. (This edited volume includes recent contributions by the key scholars 196

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into research on ELF, with between six and eight papers in each of seven sections: conceptualizing and positioning ELF, the regional spread of ELF, ELF characteristics and processes, contemporary domains and functions, ELF in academia, ELF policy and pedagogy, and ELF into the future.) Kirkpatrick, A. (ed.) (2020) The Routledge Handbook of World Englishes, 2nd ed., London and New York: Routledge. (This edited volume includes 40 contributions from various scholars describing the background to World Englishes, a range of varieties of World Englishes, emerging trends, contemporary contexts, and pedagogical implications.) Onysko, A. (ed.). (2021) Research Developments in World Englishes, London: Bloomsbury. (This edited volume summarizes the wide range of recent research in World Englishes, highlighting the plethora of approaches now being adopted by scholars from a variety of disciplines.) Seidlhofer, B. (2011) Understanding English as a Lingua Franca, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (This book provides an authoritative overview of approaches towards ELF, written by one of the key scholars in this field.)

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Dauer, R. M. (1983) ‘Stress-timing and syllable-timing reanalyzed’, Journal of Phonetics, 11: 51–62. Deterding, D. (2007) Singapore English, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Deterding, D. (2012) ‘Issues in the acoustic measurement of rhythm’, in J. Romero-Trillo (ed.), Pragmatics and Prosody in English Language Teaching, Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 9–24. Deterding, D. (2013) Misunderstandings in English as a Lingua Franca, Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton. Deterding, D. and Kirkpatrick, A. (2006) ‘Intelligibility and an emerging ASEAN English lingua franca’, World Englishes, 25(3): 391–409. Deterding, D. and Nur Raihan, M. (2016) ‘Spelling pronunciation in English’, ELT Journal, 17: 87–91. Deterding, D. and Salbrina, S. (2013) Brunei English: A New Variety in a Multilingual Society, Dordrecht: Springer. Deterding, D., Wong, J. and Kirkpatrick, A. (2008) ‘The pronunciation of Hong Kong English’, English World-Wide, 29: 148–175. Filpulla, M., Klemola, F. and Paulasto, H. (eds.) (2009) Vernacular Universals and Language Contacts: Evidence from Varieties of English and Beyond, London: Routledge. Firth, A. (1990) ‘Lingua franca negotiations: Towards an interactional approach’, World Englishes, 9(3): 269–280. Firth, A. (2009) ‘The lingua franca factor’, Intercultural Pragmatics, 6(2): 147–170. Fuchs, R. (2016) Speech Rhythm in Varieties of English: Evidence from Educated Indian English and British English, Singapore: Springer. Gut, U. (2004) ‘Nigerian English: Phonology’, in E. W. Schneider, K. Burridge, B. Kortmann, R. Mesthrie and C. Upton (eds.), A Handbook of Varieties of English. Volume 1: Phonology, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 813–30. Gut, U. (2006) ‘Nigerian English prosody’, English World-Wide, 26: 153–177. Guy, G. R. (1980) ‘Variation in the group and the individual: The case of final stop deletion’, in W. Labov (ed.), Locating Language in Time and Space, New York: Academic Press. Hall, C., Hall, C. J., Schmidtke, D. and Vickers, J. (2013). ‘Countability in world Englishes’, World Englishes, 32(1): 1–22. Ho, M. L. and Platt, J. (1993) Dynamics of a Contact Continuum: Singapore English, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Huber, M. (2004) ‘Ghanaian English: Phonology’, in E. W. Schneider, K. Burridge, B. Kortmann, R. Mesthrie and C. Upton (eds.), A Handbook of Varieties of English. Volume 1: Phonology, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 842–865. Jenkins, J. (2000) Phonology of English as an International Language, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jenkins, J. (2009) World Englishes: A Resource Book for Students, 2nd ed., London: Routledge. Kachru, B. B. (1983) The Indianisation of English, Delhi: Oxford University Press. Kachru, B. B. (1992a) ‘Models for non-native Englishes’, in B. B. Kachru (ed.), The Other Tongue: English across Cultures, 2nd ed., Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Kachru, B. B. (1992b) ‘Teaching world Englishes’, in B. B. Kachru (ed.), The Other Tongue: English across Cultures, 2nd ed., Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Kachru, B. B. (2005) Asian Englishes: Beyond the canon, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Kirkpatrick, A. (2007) World Englishes: Implications for International Communication and English Language teaching, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kirkpatrick, A. (2020a) Is English an Asian Language?, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (with Wang Lixun). Kirkpatrick, A. (ed.) (2020b) The Routledge Handbook of World Englishes, 2nd ed., London and New York: Routledge. Kirkpatrick, A. (forthcoming) ‘Teaching (about) world Englishes and English as a lingua franca’, in S. Onysko (ed.), Developments in Research on World Englishes, London: Bloomsbury. Kirkpatrick, A. and Liddicoat, A. J. (eds.) (2019) The Routledge International Handbook of Language Education Policy in Asia, London and New York: Routledge. Kirkpatrick, A. and Schaller-Schwaner, I. (forthcoming) ‘English as a lingua franca’, in E. Hinkel (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Second Language Teaching and Learning, London and New York: Routledge. Kirkpatrick, A. and Subhan, S. (2014) ‘Non-standard or new standards or errors? The use of inflectional marking for present and past tenses in English as an Asian lingua franca’, in S. Buschfeld, T. Hoffman, M. Huber and A. Kautzsch (eds.), The Evolution of Englishes, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 198

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Part II

Broadening horizons

16 Sign languages Bencie Woll and Rachel Sutton-Spence

Introduction This chapter explores applied linguistics in relation to sign languages, which have arisen spontaneously within deaf communities, operate in the visual modality, and are unrelated to the spoken languages which surround them. Despite surface differences from spoken languages, they share at a deeper level the linguistic structure of all human language and are used in parallel social and communicative contexts.

The linguistic structure of signed languages Structure and modality In the last 70 years, there has been substantial research on over a hundred different sign languages, determining that the sign languages of deaf communities throughout the world are complex natural human languages, distinct from gesture and also from spoken languages. Early modern research on sign languages emphasized the underlying structural similarities of spoken and sign languages, but more recent research has moved towards recognition that there are systematic typological differences (see Goldin-Meadow and Brentari 2017 for a review of changing emphasis in research). These differences arise mainly from the interaction of language form with modality. Phonological and morphological structures differ because sign languages have greater correspondence between form and meaning (iconicity or visual motivation) than spoken languages do. Sign languages also exploit the properties of sign language articulators (two primary articulators – the hands – as well as non-manual articulators, including the torso, head and face, eyes, and mouth) and the differing properties of the visual and auditory perceptual systems, using space for grammatical and discourse purposes and creating syntactic structures exhibiting extensive simultaneity, while spoken languages prefer linearity and affixation processes. In the light of sign language research, linguistic theory needs to take greater account of modality (Meier et al. 2003). A further step in our understanding of sign languages has been to recognize the interrelationship of language and gesture. Cognitive

DOI: 10.4324/9781003082637-19

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models are increasingly used to account for the visual motivation behind the structure and form of sign languages, irrespective of the level of language analysis (Taub 2001; Leeson and Saeed 2012; Roush 2018). Although the social histories of sign languages differ from each other in many respects, there is greater typological similarity among sign languages than among spoken languages. Their relative youth (Kegl et al. 1999) and their possible creole status (Singleton and Newport 2004; Fischer 1978) may account for some of this similarity, but visual motivation as an organizing factor in the phonology, lexicon, and syntax may also be significant. The linear syntax of spoken languages and their independence from visual motivation may allow greater differences than spatial, visually motivated syntax (Woll 1984; Taub 2001; Napoli and SuttonSpence 2014). Similarities in the structures of sign languages are sufficient for us to treat them together in a brief review here.

Phonology, morphology, and syntax Since Stokoe’s pioneering work on American Sign Language (ASL) (1960), linguists have seen signs as consisting of simultaneous combinations of handshape configuration, a location where the sign is articulated, and a movement – either a path through signing space or an internal movement of the joints in the hand. Each is understood to be a part of the phonology because changing one of these parameters can create a minimal pair. Thus, in British Sign Language (BSL), AFTERNOON1 and ORDER differ only in handshape, AFTERNOON and NAME2 differ only in location, and AFTERNOON and TWO-HUNDRED differ only in movement1. There have been considerable modifications to Stokoe’s framework since 1960, not least in relation to greater recognition of sequences of movement and hold within a sign’s structure (Liddell and Johnson 1989) and the suggestion that these sublexical parameters are more akin to features than phonemes, but this model has remained the basic description of sign language phonology. Sign language morphology tends to manifest itself in simultaneous combinations of meaningful handshapes, locations, and movements. In derivational morphology, for example, handshape can change to reflect numbers – for example, in BSL, N weeks, N o’clock, and N years old are articulated with conventionalized location and movement, while the handshape indicates the number. Signs referring to objects, and signs referring to actions related to those objects may also differ only in movement, so the verbs LOCK, SIT, and EAT are made with a single, large movement, compared to the nouns KEY, CHAIR, and FOOD, which have short, repeated movements. Inflectional morphology is also shown by changes in movement and location. Thus, degree is shown through size, speed, onset speed, and length of hold in a movement, with, for example, LUCKY having a smaller, smoother movement than VERY-LUCKY. The movement changes conveying temporal aspect are frequently visually motivated, so that repeated actions or events are shown through repetition of the sign; duration of an event is paralleled by duration of the sign (signs for shorter events being articulated for less time than signs for longer events); and when an event is interrupted suddenly, the movement of the sign is interrupted. Some verbs show number and person by movement through signing space. The direction of movement of a verb such as HAND-OVER indicates who gave what to whom. Signs can also change handshape to indicate how an object is handled. So I-HAND-OVER-A-SINGLE-FLOWER-TO-YOU

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has the same movement as I-HAND-OVER-AN-ICE-CREAM-TO-YOU but a different handshape. With their rich morphology, sign languages have relatively free word order, influenced by factors such as the pragmatics of the signers’ communicative aims and what they believe their audience to know, as well as what has already been said. Sign order is often influenced by visual motivation, with the ground signed before the figure, and the patient or goal signed before the agent, to allow the agent to have something to act upon in a visual sense. For example, WALL PAINT (put paint on a wall) and PAINT PICTURE (create a picture by painting) may be preferred orders (Napoli et al. 2017).

Different types of visually motivated signs While signed and spoken languages share many grammatical features, the visual-spatial modality provides structural possibilities less available to spoken languages. Although not all signs are visually motivated (for example, WANT and SISTER in BSL), most are derived from representations of the visual form of a referent, how it moves, or where it is located; or from a representation of the visual form of something associated with the referent. Visual motivation in the lexicon is often lost through change over time. However, signers also have the option to use non-conventionalized highly iconic structures with a deliberately illustrative intent (Cuxac and Sallandre 2007). The presence of visual motivation does not imply universality since the specific image of the referent selected for linguistic encoding is arbitrary. For example, the BSL sign TEA2 reflects the action of ‘drinking from a teacup’ while the ASL sign reflects the act of ‘dipping a teabag in a cup’. The visual properties of sign languages also allow them to convey spatial relations directly. The linguistic conventions used in such spatial mapping specify the position of objects in a highly geometric and non-arbitrary fashion by situating certain sign forms (e.g. classifiers) in space such that they maintain the topographic relations of the world-space being described (Emmorey et al. 1995). Within these structures, the handshapes in verbs of motion and location represent object features or classes (how objects are handled, their size and shape, or their function). These have been termed ‘classifiers’ (Supalla 1986; EngbergPedersen 1993), and although this term has been questioned (see Schembri 2003), it remains widespread. Both spoken and signed languages articulate lexical items sequentially. Spoken languages can give some linguistic information simultaneously (as in, for example, tone languages), and prosody adds further grammatical and affective information to the lexemes uttered. Essentially, though, humans have only one vocal apparatus so spoken languages must use sequential structures. The availability of two hands (and head and face) enables sign languages to use simultaneously articulated structures (see Vermeerbergen et al. 2007). Two hands can be used to represent the relative locations of two referents in space and their spatial and temporal relationships. In representing, for example, a person reaching for a book while holding a pen, English conjoins clauses using ‘while’ or ‘as’ to indicate two events happening simultaneously. In sign languages ‘holding a pen’ can be signed with one hand, while ‘reaching for the book’ can be signed with the other. English uses prepositions such as ‘next to’ or ‘behind’ to represent relative locations, whereas sign languages can simply place the two signs in the relative locations of the two referents.

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Sign languages within a bilingual context Case studies of non-Western deaf communities Deafness is statistically uncommon, with about 1 in 1,000 children born deaf in the Global North. The bulk of research on sign languages has been in countries where small numbers of relatively well-educated deaf people socialize within local and national deaf communities and share a common national sign language. However, there are also small isolated, often rural, communities around the world where higher rates of genetic deafness create ‘deaf villages’ which develop their own sign languages. These include the people of Desa Kolok on the island of Bali (De Vos 2016), villagers of Adamarobe in Ghana (Kusters 2015), and the Al-Sayyid Bedouin in Israel (Kisch 2007, 2008). Quadros and Silva (2017) document 12 different local sign languages used by isolated communities in Brazil. In these communities, most hearing people have some knowledge of their local sign language, but only hearing people in families with a high percentage of deaf members are fully fluent. Deaf members of these communities may have higher status at a local level than is more generally the case. These sign languages frequently come under threat because the introduction of specialist deaf education using the national sign language alters the linguistic and social dynamics of these small communities.

Translanguaging Encounters between signers and non-signers or between people who know different sign languages result in a language outcome that has been termed translanguaging (Kusters 2020). The concept of translanguaging and the ways in which deaf people communicate visually with people from outside their own language community enable linguists to appreciate more the range of linguistic and communicative options available within visually based interaction. Translanguaging also occurs in international contexts, such as conferences and congresses where deaf people who use many different sign languages communicate via International Sign. This is not an identifiable language with its own vocabulary but a way of negotiating understanding and expressing meaning through classifiers, constructed action, periphrasis, or combining several signs to express a concept. Additionally, as ASL becomes increasingly accepted as a lingua franca, some of its vocabulary has begun to be included in International Sign. However, a characteristic of translanguaging is that it varies according to its users and their needs, so the relative use of these different strategies varies, and for example, the International Sign of European signers differs substantially from the International Sign of Asian signers (Mesch 2010).

Bimodal bilingualism With the development of research on sign languages, it has become clear that bilingualism can be bimodal and unimodal. Unimodal bilingualism occurs when either two spoken or two sign languages (e.g. Irish Sign Language and BSL) are used (Adam 2017); bimodal bilingualism occurs when the two languages exist in different modalities: one signed and one spoken/written. Recognition of bimodal bilingualism has led to a re-evaluation of models of bilingualism generally (Emmorey et al. 2016). Bimodal bilingualism differs from unimodal bilingualism with respect to the temporal sequencing of languages. Hearing people with deaf parents (in some countries, they are 206

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referred to as CODAs – children of deaf adults) can acquire a sign language as a first language. As adults, they have full access to at least two languages: a visual-manual one (signed language) and an auditory-vocal one (spoken language). Emmorey et al. (2016) have explored bimodal bilingualism in CODAs, showing code-blending in the production of words and signs where these reflect a common conceptual source. Code-blending reflects the simultaneous use of sign and word in a single utterance, which is not possible for unimodal bilinguals, who must sequence linguistic elements in production. Deaf bimodal bilinguals may not use voice but still produce code-blends and codemixes (some researchers prefer the term ‘cross-modal’ to indicate that bilingualism in, for example, BSL and English can be represented in types of code-blends other than speech accompanied by signing). Cross-modal bilingualism is the norm in those countries where deaf children have access to education and are exposed to sign language. Mastery of both the sign language of the deaf community and the written language of the hearing community is the goal of deaf bilingual education since the bedrock of formal education is literacy.

Recording signs Sign languages are essentially unwritten. Written forms of some sign languages are being actively promoted using SignWriting (see www.signwriting.org), although other writing systems exist, and in Libras (Brazilian Sign Language) it is taught in some schools and universities. Increasingly, children’s literature in Libras is written directly in SignWriting, and there are also examples of Libras poetry composed in SignWriting, where the visual representation of signs is creatively combined with effective layout on the page. However, it will be many years, if at all, before these written forms of sign language attain the status and function of written forms of spoken language. Since written language is central to so much of applied linguistics, it is worth considering the implications for teaching and learning, for change and standardization, and for dictionary-making and issues of electronic storage of examples of language use. Sign languages are increasingly recorded, edited, and transmitted using digital video technology. The impact of this on sign language literature has been profound. Whereas previously, performances of creative and artistic sign language were limited to live events, digital recording has created a new space for sign language artists and their audiences to create literature. Some videos of literary sign language posted on social network sites receive thousands of views. These videos often make use of visual effects, either at the time of filming or in editing, including changes in camera perspective and use of illustrations edited into the works. The increased availability of online recorded material has made the creation of literary anthologies in sign languages an option, supporting the development of literature in sign languages, creating new genres, and providing resources for teaching sign languages as a first or second language. There is also a Deaf Studies digital journal with articles published in ASL (www. deafstudiesdigitaljournal.org). Although both video and writing allow a permanent record of a text, freed from constraints of time and space, recorded sign language has a different impact than writing. Wilcox (2003) has observed that seeing the signer (whom many will recognize and whose personality will be known) is not the same as an anonymous written record. This has great implications for the creation of linguistic corpora and language surveys and for marking in examinations – there can be no anonymous candidates in a sign language examination. 207

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Dictionaries and standardization Sign language dictionaries are usually created to collect and preserve the lexicon of the language (such dictionaries have existed for several centuries; for example, Bulwer 1644; Pelissier 1856) or to allow others to learn the language. However, these ‘dictionaries’ are more accurately ‘bilingual word lists’ using a written language and illustrations of signs. With improved video technology online, there are many examples of open-access bilingual glossaries for general and technical terminology, in which the term may be given in the written language and a video of the equivalent term in the sign language (showing directly how it is pronounced) and definitions and examples given in sign language, sometimes with illustrations (for example, see www.ssc.education.ed.ac.uk/bsl/ and https://glossario.libras.ufsc.br/). Recent advances in technology have allowed construction of sign language dictionaries based on signed corpora. Even the largest sign dictionary databases are only of several hundred thousand signs – minimal compared to most spoken language databases for corpus work – but they are proving effective, and corpus-based sign language dictionaries (signbanks) are now available in many countries, such as Germany (Dictionary – DGS Korpus, uni-hamburg.de), Brazil (https://signbank.libras.ufsc.br/pt/), and Britain (https://bslsignbank.ucl.ac.uk/). Corpora also allow researchers to identify sign frequencies so that teaching materials can be better designed. Concerns have been raised about the variable quality of many of the video sign lists. Dictionaries of minority languages often provide ‘a clear and powerful symbolic function of recognition and empowerment of the language’ (Lucas 2002: 323), but they can also threaten the language if the making of the dictionary is not carefully controlled (Armstrong 2003). As an example, Van Herreweghe and Vermeerbergen (2004) describe some of the impact of codification on Flemish Sign Language (VGT). Increased official recognition of VGT led to increased demand for educational materials, dictionaries, and grammar books. Between 1980 and 1995 a committee of deaf people worked to standardize VGT across Flanders, creating signs where there were apparent lexical gaps and choosing the most widely used variant to be the standard form. Deaf adults rarely used the new codified form, but its lexicon influenced interpreters. When deaf schools were replaced by the integration of deaf children in mainstream schools, reducing their access to each other and especially to deaf children or teachers from deaf families, non-native signer interpreters became language role models. Dialect variation in many sign languages is common, and signers from different regions often use different lexical items to refer to the same concept. BSL research in the late 1980s showed that although there were regionally specific signs for many concepts, there was frequently one lexical item that was recognized and used across all regions (Woll 1991), and the process of levelling of variation has continued (Stamp et al. 2014). At the time of that study, most deaf adults had been educated at schools for deaf children (either residential or day schools), but most children are now educated in mainstream schools. The implications of this change for BSL have been considerable, as children no longer have the same ready-made circle of signing friends and their sign language role models are now often non-native signers. One outcome of the various corpus projects conducted on sign languages around the world has been the documentation of many of these earlier regional variants.

Learning sign language as L1 Since the vast majority of deaf children are born to hearing parents, their exposure to language is very different from that of hearing children learning a spoken language. The typical experience for deaf children is late and impoverished exposure to a first language: language 208

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deprivation (Harris 2001; Hall 2017). If parents communicate only through spoken language, the child may have greatly reduced access to the linguistic signal; where parents begin to learn a sign language when deafness is diagnosed, they often have only limited sign language skills. The 95% of deaf children born to hearing parents are therefore often contrasted with the minority of deaf and hearing children who grow up with deaf parents and usually have good sign language models from birth. There is general agreement that sign language acquisition parallels that of spoken language (Newport and Meier 1985; Schick 2003; Mayberry and Squires 2006) when young children (deaf or hearing) are exposed to sign language by their deaf parents. There is some controversy about whether there is any positive effect of iconicity on early sign language acquisition. On the one hand, children’s first signs are likely to be associated with the same sets of semantic categories evident in children’s early speech, such as signs for people, animals, and food (Anderson and Reilly 2002), irrespective of iconicity. On the other hand, Novogrodsky and Meir (2020) have reported effects of iconicity on acquisition. There is evidence for a changing role of iconicity during first language acquisition. Children who acquire a sign language as their first language are unlikely to be aware of the visual motivation behind a sign such as MILK (which in BSL represents the action of milking a cow by hand). The recognition of iconicity depends on world knowledge, and there is evidence that children may return to the language forms they have learned previously, reanalyze them, and identify iconicity (Morgan 2005).

Sign language and education The use of sign languages in education varies greatly around the world and even within countries. The enduring controversy in deaf education from the early 19th century onwards which has polarized educators has been between monolingual (spoken/written language only) and bilingual (sign language and spoken/written language). The dominant approach to communication for deaf children from the late 19th to late 20th century saw no role for sign language in the education of deaf children, and the use of sign language in the classroom was actively suppressed. Nevertheless, until the 1980s, deaf children were usually educated in deaf schools and sign language was informally transmitted from child to child. Since the 1980s, while a role for sign language has been more accepted in schools, at the same time there have been strong moves towards mainstreaming deaf children. Placement in mainstream education has produced some improvements in educational achievement but has had serious social and linguistic consequences because of the loss of a natural signing community providing opportunities for full acquisition of an L1. Some deaf children informally learn sign language once they arrive at primary schools but are neither formally taught the language nor exposed to it as a language of instruction. Their access to sign language may be via school staff (teachers, classroom aides, and communication support workers) and other pupils, who may vary greatly in their signing competence. Teachers who are themselves deaf provide the best sign language role models to children in education, but their numbers vary greatly around the world. In the United States, a survey of 3,227 professionals in deaf education programmes reported that 22.0% of teachers and 14.5% of administrators were deaf; only 2.5% were deaf persons of colour (Simms et al. 2008). In Brazil, schools are legally required to provide bilingual education for deaf children if it is requested. However, this provision is rarely made in the context of a bilingual school, and the child may be on her own in a mainstream setting with interpreters in the classroom. Nevertheless, the legislation has led to training many more deaf people to become teachers, both of Libras as an L1 and as an L2 (Quadros and Stumpf 2018). 209

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Studies consistently show superior sign language skills in deaf children from deaf families compared with deaf children from hearing families (Paul and Quigley 2000), as well as persistent inadequacies in the language environment provided by education systems that report using sign language (Ramsey 1997; Greenberg and Kusché 1987). Herman and Roy (2006) found that many deaf children do not achieve age-appropriate levels of BSL, and the majority of deaf children also do not achieve age-appropriate levels of spoken/written language. Education in many countries has also had a profound effect on national sign languages historically because educators of deaf children have taken on methods of teaching and approaches to communication used in other countries. LSF (French Sign Language) has had the greatest impact; its influence can be seen clearly in Irish Sign Language (ISL; Burns 1998), American Sign Language (Lane 1984), Russian Sign Language (Mathur and Rathmann 1998), and Libras (Diniz 2010), among many others. Other sign languages have also had influential roles. British Sign Language was exported to Australia and New Zealand; Portuguese signers use the Swedish Sign Language manual alphabet because a Swedish educator helped to found a deaf school in Portugal. ISL, originally heavily influenced by LSF, has also had its own considerable impact on sign languages around the world. Irish nuns and Christian brothers have taught in Catholic schools for deaf children in countries including India, South Africa, and Australia, and the influence of ISL is noticeable in the sign languages in these countries (Adam 2017). ASL, itself, closely related to LSF, has an increasing impact on sign languages around the world. Gallaudet University attracts foreign deaf students who take ASL back to their own countries. The USA has been especially generous in providing teacher training in many third world countries. Andrew Foster, a deaf African-American, led a movement for the establishment of schools in African countries where ASL was introduced as the language of tuition (Lane et al. 1996). In Nigeria, ASL, taught in schools, is mixing with the Indigenous sign languages (Asonye et al. 2018; Schmaling 2003).

Learning sign languages as L2 There have been substantial changes in attitudes of the general public to sign language since the 1980s, particularly in the representation of sign languages in the media, and there has been an enormous increase in the number of hearing people learning sign language. There are now significantly more hearing people with some knowledge of their national sign language than members of the deaf community. Several European countries offer sign languages as L2 within the general school population (France teaches LSF within the baccalaureate system; England is introducing a GCSE in BSL). In many American universities, ASL is included as part of the modern language requirement for undergraduates (Quinto-Pozos 2011), and in Brazil, all students of licentiate degrees (required for students who wish to teach in schools) are required to study Libras for a minimum of 60 hours (Quadros and Stumpf 2018). The increased interest in learning a sign language has implications for teacher training and language resources. It also impacts on the employment of deaf signers within universities and the level of their qualifications. Since the introduction of the Brazilian law requiring bilingual education for deaf children, courses have been introduced to train teachers and interpreters, and by 2018, there were 242 deaf people employed as lecturers in Brazilian federal universities, with over 25 having PhDs (Reis 2015).

Interpreters Until the 1970s, in many countries the ‘go-between’ of hearing and deaf people was usually a hearing member of a deaf person’s family or a missioner – a church or voluntary worker 210

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with the deaf. Deaf people used the missioner as an interpreter and also frequently as an ally, adviser, and advocate. As connections between deaf communities and the church weakened, in the UK, for example, this task was taken on by social workers for the deaf (Brennan and Brown 1997). (The BSL sign SOCIAL-WORKER is derived from the old sign CHURCH-MINISTER because of their similar role in deaf life.) Social workers for the deaf and missioners for the deaf often came from deaf families and lived and socialized with members of the deaf community. Professional BSL/English interpreting began in the early 1980s, as a step towards empowerment of deaf people. These interpreters have undergone formal linguistic and interpreting training and do not advise but only relay information between the two languages, comparable to spoken language interpreters. Restricted access to interpreters in many countries is also a serious problem since interpreters enable access to communication with the hearing world. Napier et al. (2019) address the implications for deaf people of the experience of mediated communication through interpreting. Laws requiring sign language provision in public settings (such as on television or for health and legal settings) do not take into account the shortage of qualified, experienced interpreters. Problems have also arisen from the way that interpreters are trained. With interpreter training moving from the community into university settings, many members of the deaf community feel that interpreters (now often from hearing families) no longer have in-depth knowledge of the deaf communities with whom they work. Subtle language nuances, contextual information, complex social relationships, and specific language skills of a deaf client are only learned through long-term, committed relationships with a community, such as missioners and social workers had. Interpreters are now beginning to recognize the need to adapt other models of interpreting to the specific needs of the deaf community today, with calls for a more flexible approach, incorporating ideas from both the ‘traditional’ and the ‘professional’ approaches, and including recognition of the need for ethnic diversity. Deaf interpreters and translators are increasingly recognized as professionals, although deaf people have long acted as language brokers for other deaf people (Adam et al. 2011). Today, deaf translators and interpreters act as ‘relay’ interpreters as an interface between the interpreter and the deaf client in situations where a deaf person (for example, in court) may not understand the signing of a hearing interpreter, who in turn may not understand the deaf person. (Brennan and Brown 1997). Increasingly, deaf interpreters also work in the media, providing sign language translations of pre-recorded programmes or pre-prepared live programmes. They also work between sign languages in international settings – for example, between ASL and another national sign language (because ASL is increasingly considered a lingua franca) or between a national sign language and International Sign.

Conclusions The last 40 years have seen substantial social and technological change for the deaf community that has impacted on sign language. In Britain, for example, there was no BSL on television until after 1980. Forty years later, there are several hours of sign language broadcast daily (mostly in the form of sign language interpretation of mainstream programming) and an ever-increasing amount of signed video available on the Internet, including on sites such as YouTube. This greater national (and international) media exposure has impacted on dialect variation and on access of signers to foreign sign languages. Where next in the study of deaf people and signed languages? One pressing need is a review and re-examination of the experiences and achievements of deaf children and adults. Changes 211

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in technology and new research into language development and the learning of literacy and numeracy skills need to feed into such a policy review. The history of sign languages, like that of many minority languages, cannot be separated from a study of their relationship with the majority language communities which surround them. In the 21st century, there are two contrasting futures: on the one hand, there are pressures, such as the decrease in opportunities for deaf children to use sign language with their peers as a result of the shift to mainstream education, and the possible decrease in the deaf population as a result of medical intervention and advances in genetics; on the other hand, increased interest and demand from the hearing community for courses in sign language, increased use of sign language in public contexts such as television, legislation in many countries recognizing the national sign language, and increased pride of the deaf community in their distinctive language and culture. It is to be hoped and expected that sign languages will continue to thrive.

Related topics bilingual education; identity; language and culture; language emergence; L1 and L2 acquisition; language policy and planning; lexicography; linguistic imperialism; multilingualism; sociolinguistics

Note 1 Video clips are available for underlined examples of signs at https://bslsignbank.ucl.ac.uk. Subscripts (e.g. NAME2) indicate which clip in Signbank is being referred to.

Further reading Bauman, H.-D., Nelson, J. L. and Rose, H. M. (2006) Signing the Body Poetic: Essays on American Sign Language Literature, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. (This provides a helpful introduction to linguistic, cultural and literary aspects of artistic sign language.) Erting, C. J., Johnson, R. E., Smith, D. L. and Snider, B. D. (eds.) (1994) The Deaf Way: Perspectives from the International Conference on Deaf Culture, 1989, Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press. (This is a comprehensive collection of papers on sign languages and deaf culture, drawing on a wide selection of sign languages around the world.) Nicodemus, B. and Cagle, K. (eds.) (2015) Signed Language Interpretation and Translation Research, Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press. (This collection provides an overview of research on sign language translation and interpreting, including its practice, training, and techniques.) Pfau, R., Steinbach, M. and Woll, B. (eds.) (2012) Sign Language: An International Handbook (HSK – Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science 37), Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. (This handbook provides a comprehensive overview of sign linguistic research worldwide.) Rosen, R. S. (ed.) (2020) Routledge Handbook of Sign Language Pedagogy, Abingdon: Routledge. (This handbook documents research and practice in the teaching of sign languages as first and second languages.)

References Adam, R., Carty, B. and Stone, C. (2011) ‘Ghostwriting: Deaf translators within the deaf community’, Babel, 57(4): 375–393. Adam, R. E. J. (2017) Unimodal Bilingualism in the Deaf community: Language Contact between Two Sign Languages in Australia and the United Kingdom. Doctoral dissertation. University College London, London. Anderson, D. and Reilly, J. (2002) ‘The MacArthur communicative development inventory: Normative data for American sign language’, Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, 7(2): 83–119. 212

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Armstrong, D. (2003) ‘Introduction to special issue on dictionaries and lexicography, Part II: The development of national sign language dictionaries’, Sign Language Studies, 3: 378. Asonye, E. I., Emma-Asonye, E. and Edward, M. (2018) ‘Deaf in Nigeria: A preliminary survey of isolated deaf communities’, SAGE Open, 8(2): 2158244018786538. Brennan, M. and Brown, R. (1997) Equality before the Law: Deaf People’s Access to Justice, Durham: Deaf Studies Research Unit. Bulwer, J. (1644) Chirologia: Or the Natural Language of the Hand, London: R Whitaker. Burns, S. (1998) ‘Irish sign language: Ireland’s second minority language’, in C. Lucas (ed.), Pinky Extension and Eye Gaze: Language Use in Deaf Communities, Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press. Cuxac, C. and Sallandre, M.-A. (2007) ‘Iconicity and arbitrariness in French sign language: Highly iconic structures, degenerated iconicity and diagrammatic iconicity’, in E. Pizzuto, P. Pietrandrea and R. Simone (eds.), Verbal and Signed Languages: Comparing Structure, Constructs and Methodologies, Berlin: de Gruyter, pp. 13–33. De Vos, C. (2016) ‘Sampling shared sign languages’, Sign Language Studies, 16(2): 204–226. Diniz, H. G. (2010) A História da Língua de Sinais Brasileira (Libras): um estudo descritivo de mudanças fonológicas e lexicais. Masters dissertation, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Linguística. University of Santa Catarina (UFSC), Florianopolis. Emmorey, K., Corina, D. and Bellugi, U. (1995) ‘Differential processing of topographic and referential functions of space’, in K. Emmorey and J. Reilly (eds.), Language, Gesture and Space, Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Emmorey, K., Giezen, M. R. and Gollan, T. H. (2016) ‘Psycholinguistic, cognitive, and neural implications of bimodal bilingualism’, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 19(2): 223–242. Engberg-Pedersen, E. (1993) Space in Danish Sign Language, Hamburg: Signum Press. Fischer, S. D. (1978) ‘Sign language and creoles’, in P. Siple (ed.), Understanding Language through Sign Language Research, New York: Academic Press. Goldin-Meadow, S. and Brentari, D. (2017) ‘Gesture, sign, and language: The coming of age of sign language and gesture studies’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 40: E46. DOI: 10.1017/S0130525X15001247 Greenberg, M. and Kusché, C. (1987) ‘Cognitive, personal, and social development of deaf children and adolescents’, in M. C. Wang, M. C., Reynolds and H. J. Walberg (eds.), Handbook of Special Education: Research and Practice: Volume 3: Low Incidence Conditions, New York: Pergamon. Hall, W. C. (2017) ‘What you don’t know can hurt you: The risk of language deprivation by impairing sign language development in deaf children’, Maternal and Child Health Journal, 21(5): 961–965. Harris, M. (2001) ‘It’s all a matter of timing: Sign visibility and sign reference in deaf and hearing mothers of 18-month-old children’, Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, 6(3): 177–185. Herman, R. and Roy, P. (2006) ‘Evidence from the extended use of the BSL receptive skills test’, Deafness & Education International, 8(1): 33–47. Kegl, J. A., Senghas, A. and Coppola, M. (1999) ‘Creation through contact: Sign language emergence and sign language change in Nicaragua’, in M. DeGraff (ed.), Comparative Grammatical Change: The Intersection of Language Acquisition, Creole Genesis, and Diachronic Syntax, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kisch, S. (2007) ‘Disablement, gender and deafhood among the Negev Arab-Bedouin’, Disability Studies Quarterly, 27: 4. www.dsq-sds.org/article/view/45/45 Kisch, S. (2008) ‘“Deaf discourse”: The social construction of deafness in a Bedouin community’, Medical Anthropology, 27(3): 283–313. Kusters, A. (2015) Deaf Space in Adamorobe: An Ethnographic Study of a Village in Ghana, Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press. Kusters, A. (2020) ‘The tipping point: On the use of signs from American sign language in international sign’, Language & Communication, 75: 51–68. Lane, H. (1984) When the Mind Hears: A History of the Deaf, New York, NY: Random House. Lane, H., Hoffmeister, R. and Bahan, B. (1996) A Journey into the Deaf World, San Diego: Dawn Sign Press. Leeson, L. and Saeed, J. (2012) Irish Sign Language: A Cognitive Linguistic Approach, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Liddell, S. K. and Johnson, R. E. (1989) ‘American sign language: The phonological base’, Sign Language Studies, 64(1): 195–277. Lucas, C. (2002) ‘The role of variation in lexicography’, Sign Language Studies, 3: 322–340. 213

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Mathur, G. and Rathmann, C. (1998) ‘Why not “GIVE-US”: An articulatory constraint in signed languages’, in V. Dively, M. Metzger, S. Taub and A.-M. Baer (eds.), Signed Languages: Discoveries from International Research, Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press. Mayberry, R. I. and Squires, B. (2006) ‘Sign language acquisition’, in E. Lieven (ed.), Language Acquisition, Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, Vol. 11, 2nd ed., Oxford: Elsevier. Meier, R., Cormier, K. and Quinto-Pozos, D. (2003) Modality and Structure in Signed and Spoken Languages, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mesch, J. (2010) Perspectives on the Concept and Definition of International Sign, World Federation of the Deaf. www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:683050/FULLTEXT01.pdf Morgan, G. (2005) ‘The development of narrative skills in British sign language’, in B. Schick, M. Marschark and P. Spencer (eds.), Advances in the Sign Language Development of Deaf and Hard-ofHearing Children, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Napier, J., Oram, R., Young, A. and Skinner, R. (2019) ‘“When I speak people look at me”: British deaf signers’ use of bimodal translanguaging strategies and the representation of identities’, Translation and Translanguaging in Multilingual Contexts, 5(2): 95–120. Napoli, D. J. and Sutton-Spence, R. (2014) ‘Order of the major constituents in sign languages: Implications for all language’, Frontiers in Psychology, 5: 376. DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00376 Napoli, D. J., Sutton-Spence, R. and Müller de Quadros, R. (2017) ‘Influence of predicate sense on word order in sign languages: Intensional and extensional verbs’, Language, 93(3): 641–670. Newport, E. L. and Meier, R. P. (1985) ‘The acquisition of American sign language’, in D. I. Slobin (ed.), The crosslinguistic study of language acquisition. Volume 1: The data, Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Novogrodsky, R. and Meir, N. (2020) ‘Age, frequency, and iconicity in early sign language acquisition: Evidence from the Israeli sign language MacArthur: Bates communicative developmental inventory’, Applied Psycholinguistics, 41(4): 817–845. Paul, P. V. and Quigley, S. P. (2000) Language and Deafness, 3rd ed., San Diego, CA: Singular Publishing Group. Pelissier, M. (1856) Des Sourds-Muets, Paris: Paul Dupont. Quinto-Pozos, D. (2011) ‘Teaching American sign language to hearing adult learners’, Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 31: 137–158. Quadros, R. M. and Silva, D. S. (2017) ‘As comunidades surdas brasileiras’, in R. C. Zambrano and C. E. F. Pedrosa (eds.), Comunidades Surdas na América Latina, Florianópolis: Editora Bookess, pp. 135–152. Quadros, R. M. and Stumpf, M. R. (2018) ‘Reconhecimento da língua brasileira de sinais: Legislação da língua de sinais e seus desdobramentos’, in R. M. Quadros and M. R. Stumpf (eds.), Estudos da língua brasileira de sinais IV, Florianópolis: Insular, pp. 17–36. Ramsey, C. (1997) Deaf Children in Public Schools; Placement, Context and Consequences, Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press. Reis, F. (2015) A docência na educação superior: narrativas das diferenças políticas de sujeitos surdos. Doctoral thesis. Federal University of Uberlândia. https://repositorio.ufu.br/handle/123456789/17759 Roush, D. R. (2018) Event Structure Metaphors through the Body: Translation from English to American Sign Language, Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, Schembri, A. (2003) ‘Rethinking “classifiers” in signed languages’, in K. Emmorey (ed.), Perspectives on Classifier Constructions in Sign Languages, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Schick, B. (2003) ‘The development of ASL and manually-coded English systems’, in M. Marschark and P. E. Spencer (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Deaf Studies, Language, and Education, New York: Oxford University Press. Schmaling, C. (2003) ‘A for apple: The impact of western education and ASL on the deaf community in Kano State, Northern Nigeria’, in L. Monaghan, C. Schmaling, K. Nakamura and G. Turner (eds.), Many Ways to Be Deaf: International Variation in Deaf Communities, Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press. Simms, L., Rusher, M., Andrews, J. F. and Coryell, J. (2008) ‘Apartheid in deaf education: Examining workforce diversity’, American Annals of the Deaf, 153(4): 384–395. Singleton, J. L. and Newport, E. L. (2004) ‘When learners surpass their models: The acquisition of American Sign Language from inconsistent input’, Cognitive Psychology, 49(4): 370–407.

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Stamp, R., Schembri, A., Fenlon, J., Rentelis, R., Woll, B. and Cormier, K. (2014) ‘Lexical variation and change in British Sign Language’, PLoS One, 9(4): e94053. Stokoe, W. C. (1960) Sign Language Structure: The First Linguistic Analysis of American Sign Language, Silver Spring, MD: Linstok Press. Supalla, T. (1986) ‘The classifier system in American Sign Language’, in C. Craig (ed.), Noun Classes and Categorization (Typological Studies in Language 7), Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Taub, S. (2001) Language from the Body: Iconicity and Metaphor in American Sign Language, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Van Herreweghe, M. and Vermeerbergen, M. (2004) ‘Flemish sign language: Some risks of codification’, in M. van Herreweghe and M. Vermeerbergen (eds.), To the Lexicon and Beyond: Sociolinguistics in European Deaf Communities, Washington: Gallaudet University Press. Vermeerbergen, M., Leeson, L. and Crasborn, O. (eds.) (2007) Simultaneity in Signed Languages, Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Wilcox, S. (2003) ‘The multimedia dictionary of American Sign Language: Learning lessons about language, technology and business’, Sign Language Studies, 3: 379–392. Woll, B. (1984) ‘Comparing sign languages’, in F. Loncke, P. Boyes-Braem and Y. Lebrun (eds.), Recent Research on European Sign Languages, Lisse: Swets and Zeitlinger. Woll, B. (1991) ‘Variation and recent change in British Sign Language’, Project Final Report to Economic and Social Research Council.

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17 Lexicography Thierry Fontenelle

Introduction Lexicography is an area of applied linguistics that focuses on the compilation of dictionaries (practical lexicography) and on the description of the various types of relations found in the lexicon (theoretical lexicography). It is neither a new science nor a new craft. Historians generally agree that the first dictionaries can be traced back to the explanations of difficult words inserted into Latin manuscripts in the Middle Ages. These glosses evolved into glossaries, which were sorted alphabetically or thematically and came to fulfil a vital function in teaching and the transmission of knowledge (Cowie 2009: 2). The use of Latin words to explain more difficult Latin ones foreshadowed monolingual dictionaries, with their headwords and definitions, while explanations of hard Latin words in Old English or Old French can be seen as a precursor of modern bilingual dictionaries. Dictionaries are primarily compiled to meet practical needs. They are also cultural artefacts which convey a vision of a community’s language. The tension between prescriptive and descriptive approaches has often made lexicographers uncomfortable since many users perceive dictionaries as ‘authoritative records of how people ought to use language’ (Atkins and Rundell 2008: 2). Modern lexicography is more concerned with a descriptive approach where the lexicographer compiles a description of the vocabulary of a given speech community. Robert Cawdrey’s A Table Alphabetical (1604) is usually considered as the first printed monolingual English dictionary. However, the history of lexicography remembers Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755) as the first modern and innovative dictionary of English. Johnson’s Dictionary reflected the need for a prescriptive and normative authority which would serve to establish a standard of correctness. In his ‘Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language’, addressed to Lord Chesterfield in 1747, Johnson discussed all the crucial issues which lexicographers are faced with, even today, when starting a dictionary project, ranging from inflectional and derivational morphology to pronunciation and etymology. The representation of syntactic information (Johnson did not use the modern term ‘subcategorization’) attracted his attention when he pointed out that one ‘dies of one’s wounds while one may perish with hunger’. He stressed that ‘every man acquainted with our language would be offended with a change of these particles’. Johnson’s preoccupations are still at the heart of 216

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the creation of current dictionaries, especially learners’ dictionaries. He was a radical thinker who was well ahead of his time and who managed to shed light on the nature of language and meaning, long before philosophers like Wittgenstein started addressing the crucial issue of word meaning. He asked many important questions which are still hotly debated in contemporary lexicography circles. He was aware of the need to establish clear criteria for selecting words to be included in dictionaries, or for distinguishing between general language and specialized terminology. The term ‘corpus lexicographer’ did not exist in 1755, but because he was the first to base his dictionary on authentic examples of usage, collected from the works of English authors, he was definitely a precursor of corpus lexicography. A monument of English lexicography is undoubtedly Murray’s Oxford English Dictionary (OED), whose final section was published in 1928. The original aim of the project, which started in 1879, was to produce a four-volume dictionary which would record the history of the English language from Anglo-Saxon times, using nearly two million citation forms to track the genesis and evolution of lexical items. Several supplements were published in the 20th century (the first supplement appeared in 1933) and, today, the OED includes around 300,000 entries defining over half a million lexical items (Murray et al. 1933). The electronic version, which corresponds to the 20-volume integrated work, offers powerful search-and-browse functionalities which provide scholars with exciting vistas to research the history and evolution of the English language. Historical dictionaries have been compiled for several other languages, such as for French, the prime example being the Trésor de la Langue Française, whose 16 volumes are based on a huge corpus of millions of authentic citations from literary texts. It took nearly 150 years to compile the Dutch Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal (WNT), which, with its 40 volumes and 400,000 headwords, aims to provide an objective linguistic description of the vocabulary stock of that language. All these major historical dictionaries cover general-language words, but also dialectal, jargon and slang terms, as well as offensive and swear words, which are more likely to be left out from general-purpose dictionaries.

The advent of learners’ dictionaries The vocabulary control movement The most noticeable impact of lexicography on applied linguistics is probably related to the advent of learners’ dictionaries, which has heavily influenced Anglo-Saxon lexicography. One of the chief weaknesses of native-speaker dictionaries is that the words used in definitions are often difficult to understand for non-native speakers, which means that these dictionaries do not meet the specific needs of second language learners. The history of monolingual learners’ dictionaries can be traced back to the contributions of a number of key figures such as A. S. Hornby, Michael West, and H. E. Palmer, who created the so-called vocabulary control movement and can justifiably be seen as the founding fathers of applied linguistics (see also Cowie 2009 for more information about this major development). The leading figure of this movement, Harold Palmer, was interested in identifying the set of words which speakers use most frequently to communicate. After realizing that a high level of natural communication could be achieved by using a vocabulary of around 1,000 words, he worked with A. S. Hornby to produce Thousand-Word English (Palmer and Hornby 1937), a word list of initially 900 words which was intended to lighten the learning load of foreign students. Michael West took the vocabulary control idea further by developing a limited vocabulary of about 1,500 217

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words which he used to write the definitions of his New Method English Dictionary (West and Endicott 1935). West’s subsequent General Service List (1953), which includes frequency ratings for words in their particular senses as well as collocations and idioms, also definitely influenced the next generation of learners’ dictionaries. The first edition of the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, or LDOCE (Procter 1978), followed this tradition by using a controlled vocabulary of about 2,000 words to write the definitions, while, more recently, the Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners, or MEDAL (Rundell 2007), uses a limited defining vocabulary of about 2,500 words. In LDOCE, the words which do not belong to this set are printed in small capitals. Consider the definition of mink, where weasel and carnivorous are not part of the controlled vocabulary of this dictionary: mink n 1 [Wn1;C] a type of small weasel-like animal – see picture at carnivorous 2 [U] the valuable brown fur of this animal, often used for making ladies’ coats The vocabulary control movement therefore influenced the macrostructure of the dictionary. The list of words that are granted entry status is indeed significantly smaller than a nativespeaker dictionary’s macrostructure and rare and highly technical words are not likely to be included in learners’ dictionaries. The second edition of the MEDAL (Rundell 2007) highlights the top 7,500 words which account for about 92% of most texts. This distinction between high-frequency core vocabulary and less common lexical items reflects the distinction between receptive and productive vocabulary. In this dictionary, the core headwords are shown in red and are banded by frequency into three equal sets of 2,500 words each. This system is based upon research into vocabulary size, which has shown that learners need to be familiar with a fairly large number of lexical items to perform successfully at advanced level (see also Barcroft and Sunderman, on lexis, in this volume, for more details about vocabulary learning). Headwords that are part of the core vocabulary will therefore receive more extensive treatment and will provide users with more information in the form of additional examples, in-depth information about collocational and subcategorization preferences, frequent mistakes typically made by learners, and so on. The way definitions are written is also different from what can be found in dictionaries for native speakers. The use of a strictly controlled vocabulary facilitates the decoding task (understanding what a word means) and forces the lexicographer to resort to specific defining patterns or formulae (see Kamiński 2021). The following examples, excerpted from LDOCE, illustrate patterns such as ‘a person who’ to define nouns denoting professions, or ‘(cause to)’ and ‘make or become’, used to indicate that a verb participates in the so-called causative-inchoative alternation, which is typical of change-of-state verbs like open, break, boil, or increase: florist n a person who keeps a shop for selling flowers herbalist n 1 a person who grows and/or sells herbs, esp. for making medicine shorten v [T1; I0] to make or become short or shorter develop [T1; I0] to (cause to) grow, increase or become larger or more complete

Combining dictionaries and grammars The examples in the preceding section illustrate the use of a feature which distinguishes learners’ dictionaries from their unabridged counterparts for native speakers – namely, a system of grammar codes designed to represent the types of syntactic environment in which a given 218

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lexical item can be inserted. The first learners’ dictionaries owed much to Harold Palmer’s pioneering work in the field of verb syntax. Palmer had experimented with various systems for accounting for verbal valency (i.e. the nature and number of complements a verb can take) before publishing his Grammar of English Words (Palmer 1938), which was the first learners’ dictionary to contain a verb-pattern scheme. In this dictionary, each verb pattern was identified by means of a number code, and one or more codes were included in verb entries. Palmer heavily influenced A. S. Hornby in the 1930s and the latter took over this idea of using verbpattern schemes in his Idiomatic and Syntactic English Dictionary (Hornby 1942), which, in 1952, would become known as the Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English. Hornby improved on Palmer’s presentation of verb patterns and started to arrange the patterns and illustrative examples in a series of tables where vertical divisions are made to correspond to the major structural elements of a pattern, such as noun phrases corresponding to the object in verb pattern 9 (VP9) corresponding to ‘verb + object + past participle’. In 1974, Hornby adopted the verb-complementation scheme of Quirk et al.’s Grammar of Contemporary English, grouping together verb patterns that had the same major function (e.g. the class of ditransitive verbs corresponded to verb patterns 11 to 21 [VP11 to VP21]). In addition to information on pronunciation, syllable division, compounds, and irregular inflections, the first edition of LDOCE in 1978 proposed a systematic organization of grammatical categories and codes. The double articulation of the LDOCE table of grammar codes made it possible to represent the syntactic function of a given constituent class. The codes were made up of a capital letter, corresponding to word classes or parts of speech, followed by a number representing the type of environment in which a code-bearing item can be found. In these examples, the letter T in the code T1 (in shorten) corresponds to a transitive verb and the number 1 indicates that this verb can be followed by one or more noun phrases. The letter I in I0 indicates that the verb can be used intransitively, 0 meaning that it need not be followed by anything. Other letters are used for ditransitive verbs (D), linking verbs (L), uncountable nouns (U), count nouns (C), and so on. Combining the letter and number information gives a very sound and systematic indication of the syntactic environment in which a word is used in a given sense. This double articulation was at the time an innovative feature. The similarity between the realizations of syntactic patterns described by codes like T5, D5 or U5 is reflected in the makeup of the codes themselves (the code-bearing lexical item is italicized in the following examples): [D5]: ditransitive verb with noun phrase followed by a that-clause: He warned her that he would come. [T5]: monotransitive verb with one that-clause object: I know that he’ll come. [U5]: uncountable noun followed by a that-clause: Is there proof that he is here? The three codes describe a pattern that includes a common element (a that-clause), a similarity which they reflect in their internal organization, since the three codes have [5] as second element. In 1978, this was a highly innovative approach since the only major rival at the time―  Hornby’s Oxford Advanced Learners’ Dictionary (1974)―relied upon unanalyzed codes such  as VP9 (S + V + that) or VP11 (S + V + NP + that), which did not enable the user to figure out that the patterns included this common element. As can be seen here, the system of grammar codes found in learner’s dictionaries is designed to meet the encoding needs of users, especially non-native speakers of English, who need explicit guidance to produce grammatically and stylistically correct documents. This points to the dual function of dictionaries, which can be used for receptive use (to decode or understand 219

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a text), or for productive use (to encode a text). The Longman system was found to be too complex for users, however, and was subsequently abandoned.

Lumping versus splitting One of the key questions in lexicography is the issue of word senses and polysemy. Dictionaries are frequently called upon to resolve disputes about meaning (Kilgarriff 1997). They must draw a clear line around a meaning so that a use can be classified as on one side of the line or the other. Lexicographers are therefore under pressure to present sets of discrete, nonoverlapping meanings for a word. Yet when one examines corpus data and actual evidence of usage based upon collections of millions of words of authentic texts, one quickly realizes that these discrete, non-overlapping sets of senses are frequently a myth. Two key concepts to understand the dilemmas lexicographers regularly face are lumping (considering two slightly different patterns of usage as a single meaning) and splitting (which happens when the lexicographer separates slightly different patterns of usage into distinct meanings). Consider the following LDOCE definition for the verb shorten, which illustrates the lumping strategy: one single definition captures two distinct types of subcategorization possibilities, an intransitive use and a transitive one: shorten v to make or become short or shorter The same lexical-semantic property is accounted for via the splitting strategy in the same dictionary for other verbs, like addle: addle v 1 [T1; I0]

a: to cause (an egg) to go bad b: (of an egg) to go bad

The advantage of splitting the different syntactic patterns is clear: addle indeed has a specific collocational preference for the noun egg used as a patient argument (the entity that changes state). The verb shorten does not exhibit specific collocational preferences, which makes it possible to lump all the relevant information into one single definition, the conjunction or in make or become indicating that the verb participates in two distinct syntactic constructions. The question whether word senses exist at all is an important one. Dictionaries are based on a huge oversimplification which posits that words have enumerable, listable meanings, which are divisible into discrete units. Yet corpus linguistics and the systematic analysis of authentic evidence have shown that the concepts of polysemy and word senses are a lot more mysterious than we think. Some linguists prefer to talk about meaning potentials, which are ‘potential contributions to the meanings of texts and conversations in which the word is used and activated by the speaker who uses them’ (Hanks 2000). In this sense, dictionaries only contain lists of meaning potentials, while electronic corpora contain traces of meaning events. Word sense disambiguation therefore boils down to trying to map the one onto the other, and it is crucial for lexicographers to devise systems to discover the contextual triggers that activate the components making up a word’s meaning potential. Work on corpus pattern analysis, or CPA (Hanks and Pustejovsky 2005), to build up an inventory of syntagmatic behaviour that is useful for automatic sense disambiguation, seems to be a promising attempt to contribute to the development of such systems (see also Hanks 2013

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about his theory of norms and exploitations, which led to the creation of a pattern dictionary of English verbs). For practical purposes, lexicographers do divide polysemous words into numbered senses. Samuel Johnson was aware of this problem when he wrote that ‘the shades of meaning . . . pass imperceptibly into each other; so that it is impossible to mark the point of contact’ (1755). However, frequently meanings blur into each other, the lexicographer needs to sort them out and present them to the dictionary user in such a way that the information can be used to decode a text and to produce grammatically correct and natural sentences. The next section discusses the techniques used by today’s lexicographers to address this issue (see also Lin and Adolphs, on corpus linguistics, in Volume 1).

Lexicography and corpus linguistics The recent generation of learners’ dictionaries owes a lot to the late John Sinclair’s work on corpora at the University of Birmingham in the 1970s and 1980s. His research led to the publication of the COBUILD (Collins Birmingham University International Language Database) series of monolingual dictionaries. The first edition of COBUILD (Sinclair 1987) truly revolutionized the field of dictionary-making. Today, all dictionaries claim to be ‘corpus-based’ and to provide a description of the English vocabulary based upon ‘natural’ or ‘real’ data. Yet it might be objected that even the previous generation of dictionaries resorted to ‘real’ data. The main difference is that lexicographers of the pre-corpus era used to record their findings on slips of paper that they conscientiously kept in shoeboxes. They were primarily concerned with rare phenomena and weird contexts and combinations which had attracted their attention. Such shoeboxes were excellent repositories of idiosyncratic descriptions which would be better found in historical dictionaries than in monolingual learners’ dictionaries, whose task is primarily to capture the most frequent patterns of usage. Unfortunately, they frequently failed to record the prototypical uses of a word, and usually included citations from well-respected literary texts only. Another difference is that pre-corpus lexicographers had to rely on their own reading program and their encyclopaedic skills. The advent of computers has now made dozens of millions of words available to them. The sorting functionalities provided by modern concordancers enable lexicographers to examine the right and left contexts of a given word with thousands of KWIC (keyword in context) lines, which have become the primary material they use. KWIC lines are exploited to identify the typical preposition used with a given adjective or verb; they reveal collocational preferences (preferred contexts) or show that a given word is used only, say, in non-assertive contexts (consider budge, which is used exclusively in negative contexts like The door wouldn’t budge). Some linguists talk about colligational preferences, colligations being seen as a midway relation between grammar and collocation (Hoey 2005: 43). Colligation will, for example, include, in a verb, a marked preference for one particular form or use (e.g. passive or progressive form), or, in a noun, a marked preference for either the singular or plural form. Similarly, the marked preference for attributive position after a noun in the adjective galore (there will be food galore at the party) will be described as a colligational preference that should be mentioned in a dictionary entry. The following example illustrates the concept of KWIC line, in which a given word (the node) is centred in the middle of the table. A number of words to the right and left of the node are displayed. Most concordancers or corpus tools make it possible to sort such data on, say, the first word to the right or the first word to the left, which is a very effective means of discovering regular patterns in which the word can be found.

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ordainements. 4. cysticercosis in nged to grey in the case of evel of concern surrounding disease was transmitted to a prohibition on the use in ransmitted via ingestion in is aspect. 2) the brains of inutes of the conference on om in view of the spread of ncrease in the incidence of ou our information pamphlet rmality which affects adult

swine, sheep and goats when no meat or to ash grey in the case o spongiform encephalopathy (bse) a through animal protein rations ( rations of meat meal and bonemeal rations of meat meal and bonemeal which when alive have presented spongiform encephalopathy held at spongiform encephalopathy in that spongiform encephalopathy in the spongiform encephalopathy (bse)’ and culminates in death. it is c

As can be seen in the table, a word like bovine can readily be described as a noun (which can be pluralized – bovines) or as an adjective. Sorting the data on the first item to the right reveals that bovine is frequently found in multi-word entries like bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) or in collocations like bovine rations. Today, with the entire web at the lexicographers’ fingertips, one of the major problems which they face is no longer the scarcity of the data. Rather, the analysts are confronted with a wealth of data which, after a given threshold, can no longer be analyzed manually. A hundred KWIC lines are manageable. Five thousand lines cannot be read and ‘digested’ by any human being working under the time constraints imposed by publication deadlines. Yet with corpora of hundreds of millions of words, most queries are likely to generate several thousand lines. Computational linguists have therefore collaborated with lexicographers to propose a number of statistical methods to help the latter separate the wheat from the chaff and identify central and typical usages. One such method relies on the concept of mutual information (MI), which is used to identify relations between words which occur more often than chance (Church and Hanks 1990; Church et al. 1994). MI values may be used in deciding whether a sequence of two words, such as ‘requested and’, is more or less interesting than the sequence ‘requested anonymity’. Lexicographers intuitively feel that the former sequence is linguistically (and lexicographically) uninteresting, while the latter combination probably deserves more attention and is a suitable candidate for inclusion in a dictionary (whether as an example of what one can typically request or as an example of which verb typically combines with anonymity). Intuition is not reliable, however, and cannot be readily tapped to discover that one typically requests anonymity, permission (to do something), political asylum, copies (of a document), or documents themselves. The very first applications in printed dictionaries can be found in the COBUILD dictionary (Sinclair 1987). Variations of MI scores were then adapted and refined, for instance, by taking into account the relative frequencies of the words, because the original MI statistics unfortunately gave too much weight to low-frequency words. More recently, lexicographers have partnered with computational linguists who have developed techniques to ‘summarize’ the data extracted from corpora. The MEDAL team (Rundell 2007) used the Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff et al. 2004), which produces word sketches, which can be seen as distinct collocate lists for subjects, direct objects, adjectives, noun of noun phrases, and so on, extracted from a lemmatized and parsed corpus.

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Word sketches provide an interesting synthesis of the grammatical and collocational environment in which lexical items can be inserted (Kilgarriff 2006). The most salient and relevant collocations are displayed, exploiting MI and frequency statistics. The subject-of or object-of relations allow lexicographers to quickly identify typical predicates (bank is frequently found as the object of the verbs burst, rob, or privatize). Words are automatically grouped as a function of the relation which links them to the node item, which facilitates the lexicographer’s task of selecting examples and summarizing this into a dictionary entry. Of course, the ultimate analysis still requires lexicographical and linguistic interpretive skills since nothing in the lists of collocates of bank generated by the Sketch Engine indicates that the verbs burst or overflow are linked to the ‘river bank’ sense while the object of the verbs rob or privatize is the ‘financial institution’ sense of bank. The main advantages of such a tool are that it is nearly impossible to miss common and typical patterns and that the lexicographer has access to a treasure trove of pre-digested material to choose from. In MEDAL, such collaboration between lexicographers and computational linguists has resulted in the creation of ‘collocation boxes’ which list common collocates of frequent words, as in the following entry:

campaign 1 n Collocations Verbs frequently used with campaign as the object: conduct, fght, launch, lead, mount, spearhead, wage

Now that the Macmillan Dictionary is only available online, space constraints are no longer an issue and more comprehensive lists of collocations can be provided than in print dictionaries. The Sketch Engine developers also created tools that help lexicographers identify good examples and relevant lexical items whose collocates are worth including in a dictionary. The GDEX tool (Kilgarriff et al. 2008) was one of the first tools used in lexicography, as well as in language learning and teaching, to identify and extract good dictionary examples. It was adapted to a variety of languages (see Kosem et al. 2019). The systematic inclusion of information about collocational preferences in dictionary entries testifies to the revival undergone by the study of multi-word units over the last 30 years. Much of this contemporary research into the distribution of phraseological units is based upon Sinclair’s idiom principle, which states that language users have available to them a large number of semi-preconstructed phrases that constitute single choices, even though they might appear to be analyzable into segments (Sinclair 1991: 110). The idiom principle is generally opposed to the open-choice principle, which states that a large number of choices opens up and the only restraint is grammaticalness (see also Corpas Pastor and Colson 2020 for a compilation of papers in the field of computational phraseology). Learners’ dictionaries now also increasingly benefit from the analysis of learner language and learner corpora. Most of these dictionaries now include specific sections that address writing issues, using typologies of frequent mistakes compiled on the basis of large learner corpora such as the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE; Granger et al. 2002) or the Cambridge Learner Corpus. The second edition of MEDAL (Rundell 2007) is a case in

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point, with its dozens of ‘Get it Right’ boxes, which, at the level of individual entries, identify common errors, give examples from learner corpora, and suggest the correct forms, as in the following:

Contribute Get it Right! Don’t use a verb in the infnitive after contribute. Use the pattern contribute to doing something:    

Technology has contributed to improve our lives. Technology has contributed to improving our lives. A positive aspect of education is that it contributes to confrm one’s identity. A positive aspect of education is that it contributes to confrming one’s identity. You can also use the pattern contribute to something: Technology has contributed to improvements in our lives.

The role of examples One of the key questions in lexicography is what constitutes a good example to illustrate the meaning of a word and its lexical properties. Earlier dictionaries such as the OED or Johnson’s Dictionary, as we saw earlier, mainly tapped literary texts and the best authors as sources of citations. The advent of computerized corpora like the HarperCollins Bank of English in the 1980s and 1990s and, more recently, the use of the web as a corpus (Kilgarriff and Grefenstette 2003) have put hundreds of billions of words of texts at the linguist’s disposal for language research, for the compilation of dictionaries, as well as for the development of natural language processing systems. The availability of examples does not mean that the lexicographer’s task is made a lot easier, however. Thirty years ago, the controversy about the relative merits of authentic and invented examples was raging. The effectiveness of examples was discussed at length by applied linguists, who were trying to figure out whether the examples to be included in dictionaries should be excerpted from a corpus or invented by the lexicographer. Laufer (1992) showed that examples made up by lexicographers are sometimes pedagogically more beneficial for language learners than authentic ones. There is clearly a difference between interesting examples and authentic examples, and it is essential that the user of the dictionary not be distracted with unintelligible examples. The key to the effectiveness of dictionary examples is for the compiler to select real, natural, typical, informative, and intelligible sentences illustrating common usage and to resist the temptation to focus on abnormal and idiosyncratic usages. A lexicographer who would record untypical and abnormal usages in a dictionary would not do learners any favours. Atkins and Rundell (2008: 458–461) provide a series of clearly bad, uninformative, and abnormal examples published in some contemporary dictionaries, a case in point being the idiom ‘bring up the rear’, illustrated by a totally uninformative although authentic example (John brought up the rear). The most efficient examples are probably those that are based upon corpus data and that have been carefully edited to remove the irrelevant portions that distract the user. Kosem et al. (2019) illustrate the use that is made 224

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of the GDEX tool to automatically identify good example candidates in corpora. As they point out, however, experience shows that it is easier to recognize bad examples than to define the characteristics of very good examples.

Definitions Lexicographers are often judged by their ability to write definitions for dictionaries. Definitions are an essential component of monolingual dictionaries since users tend to turn to dictionaries mainly to look up words in order to find out about their meanings. In most cases, dictionaries adopt the classical Aristotelian model of definitions based upon the distinction between genus (a superordinate word which locates the item being defined in the right semantic category) and differentiae (additional information which indicates what makes this item unique and how it differs from its cohyponyms, i.e. the other members of the same category). The difficulty is to choose a genus term that is neither too general nor too specific. In many cases, dictionaries tend to define by synonym and antonym. So, if, to quote Atkins and Rundell (2008: 414), the noun convertible is defined as ‘car with a folding or detachable roof’, ‘car’ is the genus term and the differentia is the expression ‘with a folding or detachable roof’, which distinguishes a convertible from its cohyponyms saloon, estate car, or people carrier. Another strategy, introduced by the COBUILD lexicographers (Sinclair 1987), is to write longer definitions in which the definiendum (the word that is defined) is incorporated into the definition, which then takes the form of a full sentence. Consider the definition for the verb capsize in COBUILD: capsize When you capsize a boat or when it capsizes, it turns upside down in the water. Criticizing the overuse of parentheses to indicate likely objects and subjects, Hanks (1987) argues that the traditional conventions used in most modern dictionaries make definitions difficult reading for ordinary readers. COBUILD’s full-sentence definitions (FSDs) were considered a real revolution at the time, with a first part placing the word being explained in a typical structure (‘A brick is . . .’; ‘Calligraphy is . . .’; – Hanks 1987: 117) and the second part identifying the meaning. In his discussion of the pros and cons of the traditional definitions, which are supposed to be substitutable in any context for the definiendum, Hanks stresses the importance of collocational and syntactic information and argues that full-sentence definitions make it possible to suggest much more easily whether collocates are obligatory, common but variable, or simply open. Selection preferences are easier to integrate into such definitions, Hanks claims, giving the example of an ‘ergative’ (causative-inchoative) verb like fuse, as in the following COBUILD definition: 2

When a light or some other piece of electrical apparatus fuses or when you fuse it, it stops working because of a fault, especially because too much electricity is being used.

The revolution created by the introduction of full-sentence definitions attracted a lot of attention and certainly influenced other learners’ dictionaries. However, COBUILD’s relatively dogmatic approach also attracted some criticism and has not been adopted universally. Rundell (2006) acknowledges that the FSD model works better than alternative models in a number of cases (for instance, if a verb is nearly always used in the passive form, like lay up, a full 225

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sentence definition is clearly better – ‘If someone is laid up with an illness, the illness makes it necessary for them to stay in bed’). The disadvantages of the FSD model cannot be ignored, however: the coverage of an FSD-based dictionary is reduced because these definitions are on average much longer than traditional definitions. The complexity of these longer definitions is also the source of a number of problems and can be challenging for learners. Pronoun references in if-definitions can be unclear, for instance, and the redundancy found in some long-winded structures is not always informative (‘You use X to describe something that . . .’). Rundell recommends using hybrid approaches and recognizes that FSDs work in some cases but that, in many other cases, simplicity and economy are more adequate.

Bilingual dictionaries A chapter on lexicography would not be complete without a section on bilingual dictionaries, given their importance in foreign language learning. Bilingual lexicography has also undergone significant changes over the last 30 years, thanks to the availability of multilingual corpora and to advances in the field of natural language processing, which allow lexicographers to identify the collocational patterns that help users match equivalents across languages. Four major functions are generally assigned to bilingual dictionaries, depending on whether the user is using the dictionary to understand or translate a text written in the foreign language (L2) or in the first language (L1): Reception in L2 Reception in L2 + production in L1 Production in L2 Reception in L1 + production in L2 Most of the burning questions discussed in the context of monolingual lexicography also apply to bilingual dictionaries. Should the lexicographer favour lumping or splitting strategies, for instance? Other questions are more specific: should sense divisions be based upon the source language or the target language? Many bilingual dictionaries indeed divide the semantic space of source items as a function of the target language. A word which is considered as monosemic in a monolingual dictionary may therefore be regarded as polysemic in a bilingual dictionary because the target language makes distinctions which are non-existent in the source language. Consider the definition for croak in CIDE (Procter 1995), which covers the general SOUND meaning (grammar codes appear between square brackets; e.g. [I] = intransitive use): croak [SOUND] v (of animals) to make deep rough sounds such as a FROG or CROW makes, or (of people) to speak with a rough voice because of a sore or dry throat. I could hear frogs croaking by the lake. [I] “Water, water”, he croaked. [+ clause] In comparison, a bilingual dictionary such as the Collins-Robert Dictionary (Atkins and Duval 1978) makes distinctions which are based solely on the existence of different potential translations: croak 1 vi (a) [frog] coasser; [raven] croasser; [person] parler d’une voix rauque; (*grumble) maugréer, ronchonner. 226

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These examples point to the all-important nature of the metalinguistic indicators (frog, raven, person, grumble) in a good bilingual dictionary (see also Duval 1991; Béjoint and Thoiron 1996). Such dictionaries make use of collocates, subject labels, and various types of indicators to capture typical subjects or objects to provide foreign language users with as much information as possible about the semantic, syntactic, and combinatory properties of lexical items.

Conclusion It is not possible to discuss all aspects of lexicography as a branch of linguistics. In this article, we have focused on the applied linguistics features of dictionaries, which manifest themselves more clearly in pedagogical dictionaries for foreign language learners and in bilingual dictionaries. We deliberately excluded the very vibrant and active field of computational lexicography dealing with the construction of lexicons for natural language processing, which would be better suited for a handbook of computational linguistics and would deserve a chapter on its own. We have discussed several of the hot topics that are debated in lexicography circles, including the impact of the ‘corpus revolution’, which now allows lexicographers to compile dictionary entries on the basis of linguistic evidence extracted from corpora of hundreds of millions of words. Computers are good at counting and extracting patterns of usage, but condensing linguistic facts in an intelligible way and making sense of these masses of data to create reference works that are useful to language learners is still something for which lexicographers will always be needed for years to come. The tendency is to move to ‘post-editing’ in lexicography, however, where computers and sophisticated software tools automatically identify an increasingly wide range of elements (candidate collocations, definitions, examples, etc.) from corpora and present them to the lexicographer, who is invited to edit or validate the suggestions.

Related topics corpus linguistics; lexis

Further reading Atkins, B. T. S. and Rundell, M. (2008) Oxford Guide to Practical Lexicography, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (A down-to-earth, step-by-step textbook on the making of dictionaries; an essential course for the training of lexicographers) Cowie, A. P. (ed.) (2009) Oxford History of English Lexicography, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Two volumes that present the fullest account of the lexicography of English; covers general-purpose and specialized dictionaries, including the evolution of dictionaries aimed at foreign learners of English) Durkin, P. (ed.) (2016) The Oxford Handbook of Lexicography, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (A book that provides a series of chapters on the major issues confronting lexicographers and the users of dictionaries today) Fontenelle, T. (2008) Practical Lexicography: A Reader, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (A collection of articles that have become classics in the field of lexicography; covers topics hotly debated in lexicography circles: collocations and idioms, tools and methods, dictionary use, grammar and usage, word senses and polysemy, Johnson’s Plan of a Dictionary, etc.) Fuertes-Oliveira, P. (ed.) (2018) The Routledge Handbook of Lexicography, London and New York: Routledge. (A handbook with 47 chapters covering all aspects of lexicography, focusing on the functional approach, but also going beyond) 227

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References Atkins, B. T. S. and Duval, A. (1978) Robert & Collins Dictionnaire Français-Anglais, Anglais-Français, Paris: Le Robert/Glasgow: Collins. Atkins, B. T. S. and Rundell, M. (2008) Oxford Guide to Practical Lexicography, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Béjoint, H. and Thoiron, P. (1996) Les dictionnaires bilingues, Aupelf-Uref, Louvain-la-Neuve: Duculot. Church, K., Gale, W., Hanks, P., Hindle, D. and Moon, R. (1994) ‘Lexical substitutability’, in B. T. S. Atkins and A. Zampolli (eds.), Computational Approaches to the Lexicon, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Church, K. and Hanks, P. (1990) ‘Word association norms, mutual information, and lexicography’, Computational Linguistics, 16(1): 22–29. Reproduced in Fontenelle (2008). Corpas Pastor, G. and Colson, J. P. (eds.) (2020) Computational Phraseology, Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Cowie, A. P. (ed.) (2009) Oxford History of English Lexicography, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Duval, A. (1991) ‘L’équivalence dans le dictionnaire bilingue’, in F. J. Hausmann, O. Reichmann, E. Wiegand and L. Zgusta (eds.), Wörterbücher/Dictionaries/Dictionnaires. Ein internationales Handbuch zur Lexikographie/An International Encyclopedia of Lexicography/Encyclopédie internationale de lexicographie, 3, Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. Reprinted (in English) in Fontenelle (2008). Fontenelle, T. (2008) Practical Lexicography: A Reader, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Granger, S., Hung, J. and Petch-Tyson, S. (eds.) (2002) Computer Learner Corpora, Second Language Acquisition and Foreign Language Teaching, Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins: Language Learning and Language Teaching 6. Hanks, P. (1987) ‘Definitions and explanations’, in J. Sinclair (ed.), Looking Up, London: Collins. Hanks, P. (2000) ‘Do word meanings exist?’, Computers and the Humanities, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 34: 205–215. Reprinted in Fontenelle (2008). Hanks, P. (2013) Lexical Analysis: Norms and Exploitations, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hanks, P. and Pustejovsky, J. (2005) ‘A pattern dictionary for natural language processing’, in T. Fontenelle (ed.), Revue Française de Linguistique Appliquée – Numéro spécial: Dictionnaires: nouvelles approches, nouveaux modèles, December, X-2: 63–82. Hoey, M. (2005) Lexical Priming: A New Theory of Words and Language, London: Routledge. Hornby, A. S., Cowie, A. P. and Windsor Lewis, J. (eds.) (1974) Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English, 3rd ed., London: Oxford University Press. Hornby, A. S., Gatenby, E. V. and Wakefield, H. (1942) Idiomatic and Syntactic English Dictionary, Tokyo: Kaitakusha. Johnson, S. (1755) ‘A dictionary of the English language’, Preface. https://www.lexilogos.com/document/johnson_dictionary_preface.htm (accessed on 30 May 2023). Kamiński, M. P. (2021) Defining with Simple Vocabulary in English Dictionaries, Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Kilgarriff, A. (1997) ‘I don’t believe in word senses’, Computers and the Humanities, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 31(2): 91–113. Reprinted in Fontenelle (2008). Kilgarriff, A. (2006) ‘Collocationality (and how to measure it)’, in Corino, Marello and Onesti (eds.), Proceedings of the XIIIth EURALEX International Congress, Torino: Università di Torino, pp. 997–1004. Kilgarriff, A. and Grefenstette, G. (2003) ‘Introduction to the special issue on the web as corpus’, Computational Linguistics, 29(3): 333–348. Reprinted in Fontenelle (2008). Kilgarriff, A., Husak, M., McAdam, K., Rundell, M. and Rychlý, P. (2008) ‘GDEX: Automatically finding good dictionary examples in a corpus’, in E. Bernal and J. DeCesaris (eds.), Proceedings of the XIIIth EURALEX International Congress, Barcelona: University of Barcelona. Kilgarriff,  A.,  Rychlý,  P.,  Smrž,  P.  and  Tugwell,  D.  (2004)  ‘The  sketch  engine’,  in  G.  Williams  and  S. Vessier (eds.), Euralex 2004 Proceedings, Lorient: University of Bretagne-Sud, pp. 105–116. Reprinted in Fontenelle (2008). Kosem, I., Koppel, K., Zingano Kuhn, T., Michelfeit, J. and Tiberius, C. (2019) ‘Identification and automatic extraction of good dictionary examples: The case(s) of GDEX’, International Journal of Lexicography, 32(2): 119–137. Laufer, B. (1992) ‘Corpus-based vs lexicographer examples in comprehension and production of new words’, in Euralex’92 Proceedings, Tampere: University of Tampere, pp. 71–76. Reprinted in Fontenelle (2008). 228

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Murray, J. A. H., Bradley, H., Craigie, W. A. and Onions, C. J. (eds.) (1933) The Oxford English Dictionary, Being a Corrected Reissue, with a Supplement, (OED1), Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2nd ed. www. oed.com Palmer, H. E. (1938) A Grammar of English Words, London: Longmans, Green. Palmer, H. E. and Hornby, A. S. (1937) Thousand-Word English, London: George Harrap. Procter, P. (ed.) (1978) Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, 2nd ed. (edited by D. Summers, 1987.), Harlow: Longman Group. (LDOCE1). Procter, P. (1995) Cambridge International Dictionary of English, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (CIDE). Rundell, M. (2006) ‘More than one way to skin a cat: Why full-sentence definitions have not been universally adopted’, in Corino, Marello and Onesti (eds.), Proceedings of the XIIth EURALEX International Congress, Turin: Università di Torino, pp. 323–338. Reprinted in Fontenelle (2008). Rundell, M. (ed.) (2007) Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners, Oxford: Macmillan Publishers. (2nd ed. – MEDAL). Sinclair, J. (ed.) (1987) Collins Cobuild English Language Dictionary, London and Glasgow: Collins. Sinclair, J. (1991) Corpus, Concordance and Collocation, Oxford: Oxford University Press. West, M. P. and Endicott, J. G. (1935) The New Method English Dictionary, London: Longmans, Green.

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18 Translation and interpreting Mona Baker and Luis Pérez-González

Introduction As language-based activities that have practical implications, translation and interpreting are often seen as falling within the remit of applied linguistics. This chapter focuses on key issues that have interested both translation scholars and applied linguists in recent years. The use of translation in language teaching falls outside the remit of this chapter; see Cook (2009) and Laviosa (2020) for an authoritative view of this issue. Increased globalization, growing mobility of people and commodities, and the spread of armed conflicts since the turn of the 21st century have established translation and interpreting more firmly in the public consciousness. For one thing, translators and interpreters have become important economic players in the services sector worldwide in their capacity as facilitators and beneficiaries of increased interconnectedness. Between 2009 and 2019, global translation industry surveys reported a healthy compound annual growth rate of 7.76% (CSA 2019), and language services providers bounced back from the downturn caused by the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic faster than other economic sectors (CSA 2021). But translators and interpreters are now also widely recognized as important political players, with their involvement in Iraq, Afghanistan, Darfur and more recently in Ukraine receiving widespread media attention. This chapter explores the growing pervasiveness of translation and interpreting in all domains of private and public life, with particular emphasis on their social and political relevance. It examines their contribution to the delivery of institutional agendas – from supranational organizations to judicial and healthcare services at community level, their role in the negotiation of power differentials in social life, and their growing visibility in various spheres of conflict, including protest movements and war zones. The chapter also examines the key role that translation and interpreting play in promoting cultural and linguistic diversity in the information society and in developing multilingual content in global media networks and the audiovisual marketplace against the backdrop of the growing dominance of English as a lingua franca. Finally, it surveys the technological developments underpinning the proliferation of multimodal texts that require more complex forms of translation, including new modalities of intersemiotic assistive mediation to empower sensory impaired members of the community. 230

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Historical overview Although the intellectual interest in translation goes back several centuries, the academic study of translation and interpreting dates back only to the middle of the 20th century (Baker 2005). Initially focusing on short, often decontextualized stretches of text, much theorizing between the 1950s and the 1980s involved elaborating taxonomies of equivalence between source texts and their translations (Baker and Pérez-González 2011). During this period, translation equivalence was discussed in terms of semantic correspondence between original and translated texts (Rabin 1958); the extent to which the target version reproduced the effect that the source text had on its original readership (Nida 1964; Nida and Taber 1969; Larson 1984); the degree of alignment between the most prominent textual functions or communicative purposes in the original text and its translated version (Reiss 1971; House 1981); and finally in terms of translators’ compliance with the commissioner’s specifications (Vermeer 2000 [1989]; Nord 1991). By the late 1980s, cultural studies and literary theory in particular had come to exercise considerable influence on the study of translated texts as instances of interaction embodying the values a given culture attaches to certain practices and concepts (Venuti 1995; Hermans 1996; Tymoczko 1999). By then, too, translation scholars had begun to draw on an expanding array of theoretical strands and fields within linguistics – including but not limited to critical discourse analysis, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, conversation analysis, psycholinguistics, and semiotics (Saldanha 2009). The work of Hatim and Mason (1990, 1997) proved extremely influential in widening the remit of linguistically informed studies of translation and interpreting, in particular by engaging with issues of ideology and positioning. Since the mid-1990s, corpus linguistics has provided a robust methodology for studying translation (Laviosa 2002; Olohan 2004; Zanettin 2014). Initially, corpus-based translation studies sought to facilitate comparison between a computer-held corpus consisting exclusively of translated text and one holding only non-translated texts produced in the same language. Such comparison aims to demonstrate the distinctive nature of translation as a genre in its own right by identifying recurrent patterns in the language produced by translators (Baker 1996; Laviosa 1998) and interpreters (Pérez-González 2006a). Baker (1993) first proposed that translation is constrained by a fully articulated text in another language that inevitably leaves traces in the language translators produce. But corpus-based studies of translation go further, providing evidence that translators tend to make explicit what is either implicit in the source text or would be implicit in a non-translated text in the same language – for example, they have a tendency to spell out the optional that in reporting structures in translated English text compared to non-translated English in the same genres (Olohan and Baker 2000). De Sutter and Lefer offer a critical analysis of the current state-of-the-art and outline a revised research agenda based on ‘multi-methodological designs and advanced statistical modelling’ (2020: 18) that nevertheless focuses on the nature of translation as a form of ‘constrained communication’ (ibid.: 19). Adopting a broader definition of translation, studies based on the AHRC-funded Genealogies of Knowledge project (2016–2020) have drawn on corpora to examine the crosscultural mediation of key concepts in political and scientific discourse, such as common people (Jones 2019) or sign versus symptom in medicine (Karimullah 2020). A more recent extension of this methodology focuses on explaining controversies surrounding concepts which underpin the practice and ethos of modern medicine, such as evidence in evidence-based medicine (Buts et al. 2021). Since the 1990s, many studies have focused on the influence of ideology and power on translators’ decision-making. The extent to which translational behaviour facilitates the use of language as an instrument of ideological control is a recurrent object of enquiry in studies 231

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informed by critical discourse analysis (CDA), including corpus-based CDA (Kim 2020). Other research strands informed by the social sciences explore how different types of narrative, understood not as a genre but as our primary means of making sense of the world, impact the way in which translators mediate texts as well as how readers/listeners interpret translations (Baker 2006; Bassi 2015; Boukhaffa 2018). On the whole, this critical body of research interrogates how the professional conduct of translators and interpreters is negotiated against the backdrop of existing norms of translation as a social institution and have challenged the widely held perception of translation and interpreting as routinized, uncritical activities.

Current research issues in translation and interpreting Translation and interpreting as institutionalized and institutionbuilding practices The role of translation in effecting institutional change has long been documented by translation and interpreting historians (e.g. Lung 2016). Drawing on Koskinen’s (2008: 17) definition of institutions as forms of ‘uniform action governed by role expectations, norms, values and belief systems’, this section examines the impact of translation on two types of contemporary institutional settings: local/national organizational systems and supranational bureaucratic cultures. With increased globalization, migration, and other forms of mobility, interpreters and translators have come to play a prominent role in encounters between institutional representatives and lay citizens. In bilingual common law courtroom proceedings, for instance, barristers use sophisticated questioning strategies whose effectiveness is heavily dependent on the interpreters’ mediation (Berk-Seligson 1999; Hale 2001; Pérez-González 2006a). The legal profession has attempted to regulate the impact of such mediation by means of codes of practice that require interpreters to refrain from explicating or clarifying verbal elements deliberately left ambiguous, implicit, or unclear in the counsel’s questions. In doctor-patient interactions and interviews of asylum seekers and political refugees, interpreters are expected to exercise their discretion in organizationally sanctioned ways and have been found to enforce rigid questionanswer exchanges aligned with institutional agendas. Medical interpreters, for example, focus on eliciting and interrogating diagnostically relevant information while excising patients’ own personal concerns (Bolden 2000). Interpreters similarly prevent political refugees from launching into a narrative of their personal tragedies while their asylum claims are being assessed (Jacquemet 2005). However, even interpreters bound by the strictest codes of ethics often fail to provide the sort of straightforward, unedited renditions which their organizational co-interactants expect (Angelelli 2004). Lack of syntactic and semantic equivalence between languages, together with the stress under which they operate, often lead interpreters to inadvertently alter the tenor of the original utterance, such as by downgrading the suggestive and intimidating nature of key questions and statements. Conference interpreters working in highly formal contexts have also been shown to depart from their canonical roles as conduits and speak in their own voice to defend themselves against charges of misinterpreting by other interactants wishing to use them as scapegoats (Diriker 2004). It has therefore been argued that interpreting studies should refrain from ‘comparing the propositional meaning of utterances and their interpretation’ and seek instead to challenge the conceptualization of interpreters as neutral conduits by describing ‘the behaviour of all parties in terms of the set of factors governing the exchange’ (Mason and Stewart 2001: 54). Such arguments have paved the way for the emergence and consolidation of 232

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dialogue interpreting studies, a distinct subfield within interpreting studies which approaches face-to-face encounters as triadic exchanges between the institutional representative, the client, and the interpreter (Mason 2001). The power imbalance inherent in interpreter-mediated institutional encounters makes politeness theory an attractive framework to draw on. In these settings, interactants realign themselves as required by the turn-by-turn unfolding of the conversation and exploit the politeness and face-saving strategies available at each stage to maximize the effectiveness of the ongoing interview or interrogation, occasionally mitigating face-threatening acts – for example, when a lay interactant refuses or fails to comply with the requirements of the institutional representative. Goffman’s (1981) ‘participation framework’ has proved helpful for researchers working on interpreter-mediated interaction (Wadensjö 1998; Roy 2000; Marks 2012). Studying shifts in footing may reveal the interpreters’ alignments with lay people and institutional representatives, highlight their role as institutional ‘gatekeepers’ (Wadensjö 1998), and yield insights into the repair and bridging work they carry out using an array of hedging, downtoning, amplifying, and turn-taking managing devices. For example, to ensure that doctor-patient interviews unfold successfully, medical interpreters may offer their own answers to patients’ questions, acting as covert co-diagnosticians (Davidson 2000). This body of scholarship has shown that interpreters may claim a participatory role for themselves ‘as speaking agents who are critically engaged in the process of making meaningful utterances that elicit the intended response from, or have the intended effect upon, the hearer’ (Davidson 2002: 1275). While acknowledging interpreters’ active involvement in the management of institutional interaction, scholars investigating institutions that regulate the flow of asylum seekers and political refugees (Barsky 1996; Inghilleri 2007), journalists reporting on the involvement of interpreters and translators in armed conflicts (Levinson 2006; Packer 2007), and professionals concerned about the welfare of interpreters operating in war zones (Kahane 2007) have also addressed the interpreters’ vulnerability to exercises of power by institutional representatives. Interpreters working in the asylum system are often co-opted into the relevant institutional cultures and made to assume responsibilities that lie outside their canonical role, such as by participating in the evaluation of the asylum applicant’s credibility, thus exacerbating their shifting perceptions of their own position as mediators within these structures of power. Similarly, interpreters working for the American troops in Iraq in the first decade of the 21st century were often assigned intelligence-gathering tasks that further alienated them from their local community and put their lives at greater risk (Packer 2007). Beyond nationally based systems, international and pan-national organizations also rely heavily on translators and interpreters. Multilateral institutions address their respective constituencies through translated and interpreted texts, such that ‘in a constructivist sense, the institution itself gets translated’ (Koskinen 2008: 22). These organizations often attempt to hide their translational character and subsequently to efface the role played by translators and interpreters at different levels. On the one hand, translators’ and interpreters’ individual identities and contributions are diluted through the enforcement of collective workflow processes which serve to strengthen the public perception of the organizational voice. On the other hand, translators’ and interpreters’ ability to exercise their professional discretion is significantly restricted by means of institutional guidelines which seek to effect a gradual routinization and mechanization of translational behaviour and ensure that the language they produce ‘functions seamlessly as part of the discourse’ of the institution in question (Kang 2009: 144). Despite the efforts of international organizations to develop translational cultures of their own, scholars have identified a slippage between what translators and interpreters are officially expected or asked to do and what they actually do. This has been attributed to mismatches between 233

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institutional doctrine and ‘interpreting habituses’ (Marzocchi 2005) and to the growing impact of the economics of translation (i.e. time/costs factors), rather than sociocultural policies, as the driving force behind institutional agendas (Mossop 2006). Mason (2004 [2003]: 481) also reports on the ‘little uniformity of practice or evidence of influence of institutional guidelines on translator behaviour’ in his analysis of data from the European Parliament and UNESCO. His study suggests that institutional translators are responsible for numerous ‘discoursal shifts’ (i.e. concatenations of small shifts in the use of transitivity patterns throughout the translated text), which result in attenuating or intensifying the message conveyed in the original text. Mason’s contention that such discoursal shifts display traces of the ideologies that circulate in the translators’ environment reinforces their interactional status as agents who are actively engaged in the production of institutional discourses, rather than simple mouthpieces whose role consists of consolidating ‘habitualized’ discourses through mechanistic practices of mediation. Duflou’s (2016) ethnographic research on the socialization of Dutch conference interpreters at the European Union institutions shows how the development of their competence in applying the practical and setting-determined know-how required in the booth influences their production of institutional discourses.

Power, inequality, minority Much of the current literature in the field approaches cross-cultural encounters involving an element of interlinguistic mediation as a space of radical inequality. Translators and interpreters mediating these encounters are involved in asserting, questioning, and sometimes forcefully resisting existing power structures, suggesting that translation does not resolve conflict and inequality by enabling dialogue but rather constitutes a space of tension and power struggle in its own right. Casanova (2010) examines translation as a factor in the struggle for legitimacy in the literary and political fields – a factor that participates in consecrating authors and works, both nationally and internationally, and in the distribution and transfer of cultural capital. In her model, structural inequality evident in the imbalance between dominating and dominated languages and literatures reflects the struggle within any field in Bourdieu’s terms. Inghilleri similarly draws on Bourdieu’s notions of habitus, field, capital and illusio to demonstrate that interpreters working in the asylum system ‘act within and are constituted by . . . power-laden macro-structures . . . that impact directly and indirectly on the interpreting activity’ (2003: 261). Growing interest in issues of power and inequality has naturally drawn attention to the role played by translation and interpreting in shaping the relationship between minority and majority groups in any society. Translation has always been a powerful instrument of the nationstate, not only in colonial and post-colonial contexts (Niranjana 1990; Dodson 2005) but also in the context of more modern, multicultural, and multi-ethnic societies. Minority issues become particularly acute, with translation and interpreting acquiring increased significance in diglossic situations where the dominant, colonial, or majority language inhabits and has monopoly on official, public life and where the native language is relegated to the realm of the home, the casual, and the ephemeral. Cronin (1998) was among the first to stress the urgency of exploring the effects of translation on various minority languages given their diminishing numbers across the world. He distinguishes between translation efforts that seek to obliterate the minority language by assimilating it to the dominant language and those which seek to retain and develop the minority language and resist its incorporation into the dominant language. Examples of the former abound in the Irish experience and are brought to life vividly in Brian Friel’s Translations (Friel 1981), a play that depicts the process of Anglicizing Ireland through the British 234

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Ordnance Survey in 1833. Examples of the latter include translation both from and into Welsh in many official contexts today, and translations undertaken from a wide range of prestigious literatures and languages into Scots in order to ‘raise its status and establish its validity as a literary medium’ (Corbett 1999: 3). Beyond the mere survival of the dominated language, translation into a minority language like Corsican is sometimes also ‘a way of demonstrating a new confidence in [that] language and identity by acting as if it were a language of power’ (Jaffe 2010 [1999]: 264; emphasis in original). The deaf and hard-of-hearing are often treated as a minority group: their interaction with the hearing community constitutes a site of power struggle in which translation and interpreting can play either an oppressive or empowering role. Those who are born deaf generally do not acquire the majority language or do not acquire it to native-speaker level, and because of their inability to hear, they rely on interpreters throughout their life across a range of contexts. Although access to interpreters allows this particular minority group to participate more fully in various aspects of social life, the mere provision of interpreting services has been shown to have a disempowering effect by creating an illusion of access or independence without necessarily putting the deaf person on an equal footing with their hearing co-interactants (McKee 2003). Together with the issues arising from the low number of native sign language entrants (Napier and Leeson 2016) and the under-representation of certain ethnic groups within the interpreting profession (Leeson and Sheridan 2020), the need to increase deaf political participation has emerged as an important research theme (Turner et al. 2017).

Activism, protest, and social movements Research on translation and political activism was given impetus at the turn of the century by Tymoczko’s (2000) critical analysis of discourses on translation and engagement that are aimed at a literary elite. Against the then dominant understanding of resistance in translation as a question of adopting a disruptive, or foreignizing, translation strategy (Venuti 1995), she argued that ‘[t]rying to prescribe a single translation strategy [to effect political change] is like trying to prescribe a single strategy for effective guerrilla warfare’ (Tymoczko 2000: 42). Instead, for translation to be politically effective, translators have to work together as a group with a common agenda, select texts for translation with that agenda in mind, and vary their strategies for tactical purposes. A number of studies have since analyzed the working practices of groups of translators and interpreters with a declared activist agenda, such as Babels and Tlaxcala (Boéri 2008; Baker 2013). Halley (2019) examined the practices of a group of volunteer American Sign Language interpreters which formed around the 1988 Deaf President Now protest movement at Gallaudet University, focusing on the way it developed a collective identity with the deaf protestors. Recently published collections (e.g. Gould and Tahmasebian 2020) bring together further important contributions from settings as varied as Iran, Palestine, Japan, and Mexico. The global spread of protest movements in late 2010/early 2011 drew further attention to the role of translation in political activism. Baker (2016) examined the subtitling practices of collectives active during the Egyptian Revolution, focusing on the extent to which they undercut the political project by failing to reflect its goals or enhanced it by providing additional space for actualizing these goals. By claiming visibility and exercising agency in pursuit of prefigurative agendas, these activist communities aim to put into practice values such as ‘solidarity, diversity, non-hierarchy, horizontality and non-representational models of practice’ and to bring ‘the world they aspire to create into existence’ (Baker 2019: 460). The most extended investigation into the role of translation in contemporary social movements to date is 235

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Fernández (2020). The study highlights the centrality of translation in various types of political activity during the Spanish 15M movement, concluding that it did not necessarily constitute a ‘beneficial contribution to political transformation’ in this context. Instead, as in many other sites of interaction, translation is revealed to be ‘a complex and unpredictable process that is subject to multiple “partisan” engagements’ (Fernández 2020: 132).

Translators and interpreters in the war zone Scholars of translation have only recently begun to engage in a sustained manner with various aspects of the role and positioning of translators and interpreters in the war zone. Their focus has varied from an interest in the impact of interpreter and translator behaviour on other parties in the conflict, and the way they align or do not align with the institutions that employ them (Baker 2010; Salama-Carr 2007), to the impact of the war situation and proximity to violence on the interpreters and translators themselves (Inghilleri 2008, 2009; Maier 2007), especially ‘non-professional and untrained mediators’ (Tryuk 2021: 399). Todorova and Ruiz Rosendo’s (2021) Interpreting Conflict brings several of these themes together and examines a wide range of contexts (military, humanitarian, activist) and cultural locations, such as in Korea, Japan, Afghanistan, Iraq, the Sahel, Spain, and Argentina, among others. Focusing on mourning walls in Aleppo, Bader Eddin (2020) is one of very few studies to offer an extended analysis of specific strategies of translation and their impact on the reception of textual and visual messages from war zones in Western media. Haddadian-Moghaddam and Scott-Smith (2020) bring together a number of important studies of translation and interpreting during the Cold War. Baker (2006) demonstrates how the discursive negotiation of competing narratives of wars and armed conflicts is realized in and through acts of translation and interpreting in the media, literature, scholarly articles, documentary film, political reports, and websites. Rafael (2007) argues that in the case of armed conflicts, interpreters can become particularly involved on the ground and find themselves occupying precarious positions, often exposed to extreme discursive violence and distrusted by the very parties that deployed them as instruments of surveillance. Despite their essential function in fighting insurgents, he argues, locally hired interpreters are also feared as potential insurgents themselves. Indeed, distrust of local interpreters and translators in the context of imperial expansion has been documented elsewhere, such as by Niranjana (1990) for colonial India and Takeda (2009) in relation to US concerns about employing second-generation Japanese Americans in code-breaking work during the Second World War. Research on the role of translators and interpreters in mediating armed conflict suggests that they typically assume a wide range of tasks that extend well beyond any canonical definition of their responsibilities and obligations. Takeda (2009: 52) explains how Japanese Americans recruited and trained by the US military during the Second World War ‘translated captured enemy documents, interrogated Japanese prisoners of war, persuaded Japanese soldiers and civilians to surrender, and participated in propaganda activities’. Based on interviews with British and French journalists who worked in Iraq following its invasion by US troops in 2003, Palmer (2007) confirms that interpreters often selected the individuals to be interviewed by the media representative and advised on whether it was safe or practical to travel to a particular place to secure an interview.

Translation and interpreting in the globalized information society Recent technological developments have brought about a ‘de-materialization of space’ (Cronin 2003) and sped up the circulation of information, facilitating the creation of supraterritorial 236

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readerships and audiences. Translation scholars have explored the dynamics of language flows in the global deterritorialized space, demonstrating how the dominant lingua franca influences other languages via processes of translation and multilingual text production (House 2013) and how translation can serve as a strategy of resistance against the linguistic and cultural dominance of English (Chan 2016). Bennett (2007) examines the role of translation in strengthening the position of English as lingua franca in academic discourse and, hence, in configuring knowledge and controlling the flow and format of information. The ‘predatory’ discourse routinely employed by academics is hierarchically organized into sections with a clear introduction, development, and conclusion. Impersonal structures, such as passive and nominalized forms, are preferred to create the illusion of impartiality, while material and existential processes are used to enhance objectivity. Bennett draws on examples of Portuguese academic articles translated for publication in English to demonstrate the extent to which the ideological framework that informs the original articles is disrupted and replaced by a positivist structure inherent to English academic discourse. She concludes that translators’ complicity in enforcing ideologies embedded in English academic discourse must be questioned since it can lead to the systematic destruction of rival forms of knowledge. House (2004, 2008) investigated the communicative norms that operate in a wide range of texts translated from English and those operating in comparable texts written originally in the target language. According to House (2008: 87), textual norms in languages other than English are likely to be adapted to Anglophone ones, ‘particularly in the use of certain functional categories that express subjectivity and audience design’. Such adaptations include shifts from the ideational (message-oriented) to the interpersonal (addressee-oriented) function of language, from informational explicitness to inference-inducing implicitness, and from ‘densely packed information to loosely linearized information’ (House 2004: 49). Technological advances have stimulated interest in the variety of multimodal texts that circulate in a growing range of professional and recreational settings. Boria et al.’s (2019) Translation and Multimodality explores how the simultaneous occurrence of multiple semiotic modes – including but not limited to the spoken and written word, gestures, visuals, music, and colour – across textual genres calls for a retheorization of translation practices. While the study of multimodal translational behaviour has traditionally focused on subtitling, dubbing, and assistive forms of intersemiotic translation, such as audio description and subtitling for the hard of hearing (Pérez-González 2019), scholarly attention is increasingly shifting towards new research themes and settings, such as embodied multimodal meaning-making and museum accessibility (Pérez-González 2020). The emergence of new patterns in the distribution and consumption of audiovisual content in digital space has drawn scholarly attention to networked communities of translators seeking to effect aesthetic or political change. Unhappy with the paucity and cultural insensitivity of commercial translations of their favourite audiovisual programmes and genres, networks of fans, known as fansubbers, produce their own subtitled versions, which are then circulated globally online (Dywer 2019). To allow their fellow fans to experience the cultural ‘otherness’ of the content they subtitle, these amateur translators exploit traditional meaning-making codes creatively and criss-cross the traditional boundaries between linguistic and visual semiotics in innovative ways. For example, they use headnotes and written glosses at the top of the screen to expand or elaborate on the meaning of ‘untranslatable’ cultural references in the film dialogue; the cultural references in question still feature untranslated within the ‘traditional subtitle’ displayed simultaneously at the bottom of the screen. Fansubbers also favour the ‘dilution’ of subtitles within the image: technological developments allow them to display subtitles in unusual 237

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angles, perspectives and fonts which blend in with the aesthetics of the film, thus maximizing the viewer’s enjoyment of the visuals (Pérez González 2006b).

Future directions As it continues to develop in the 21st century, the next and most consequential challenge for translation studies is to shed its Eurocentric origins and prepare to embrace the variety of theoretical perspectives, experiences, and traditions that the West’s many ‘others’ have to offer. This challenge is already being undertaken, with a growing number of voices of nonWestern scholars continuing to gain strength and calling into question much-received wisdom in the field (Hung and Wakabayashi 2005; Cheung 2006; Bandia 2008; Selim 2009; Gould and Tahmasebian 2020). Cronin’s notion of eco-translation, understood as ‘all forms of translation thinking and practice that knowingly engage with the challenges of human-induced environmental change’ (2017: 2), is also bound to play a central role in the development of disciplinary discourses in translation studies, as the consequences of the climate emergency become irreversibly lodged in public consciousness. Eco-translation is not only enabling a reconceptualization of the past, present, and future of translation itself but also yielding new insights into the tradosphere, a notion encompassing the study of various regimes of control and attention, the sustainability of minoritized languages, and the circulation of information and knowledge within global linguistic ecologies.

Related topics institutional discourse; the media; medical communication; culture; identity; migration; linguistic imperialism; corpus linguistics; critical discourse analysis; discourse analysis; multimodal communication

Further reading Baker, M. (ed.) (2010) Critical Readings in Translation Studies, London: Routledge. (A thematically organized reader which prioritizes developments in the field rather than foundational texts and features detailed summaries of each article, follow-up questions for discussion, and recommended further reading) Baker, M. and Saldanha, G. (eds.) (2020) The Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, 3rd ed., London: Routledge. (A standard reference in the field which features extended entries on core concepts, types of translation and interpreting, and theoretical approaches) Munday, J. (2016) Introducing Translation Studies: Theories and Applications, 4th ed., London: Routledge. (A balanced and accessible overview of the main theoretical strands in the discipline, supported by illustrative case studies in different languages, suggestions for further reading, and a list of discussion and research points) Pöchhacker, F. (2016) Introducing Interpreting Studies, 2nd ed., London: Routledge. (An accessible introduction to interpreting studies as an academic discipline, outlining its origins and development to the present day) Venuti, L. (2021) The Translation Studies Reader, 4th ed., London: Routledge. (A chronologically organized reader which focuses largely on foundational texts, with extended introductions to each section that clearly outline the main trends during the relevant period)

References Angelelli, C. (2004) Re-Visiting the Role of the Interpreter, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Bader Eddin, E. (2020) ‘Translating mourning walls: Aleppo’s last words’, in R. R. Gould and K. Tahmasebian (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Activism, London: Routledge, pp. 147–164. 238

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Baker, M. (1993) ‘Corpus linguistics and translation studies: Implications and applications’, in M. Baker, G. Francis and E. Tognini-Bonelli (eds.), Text and Technology: In Honour of John Sinclair, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 233–250. Baker, M. (1996) ‘Corpus-based translation studies: The challenges that lie ahead’, in H. Somers (ed.), Terminology, LSP and Translation: Studies in Language Engineering, in Honour of Juan C. Sager, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 175–186. Baker, M. (2005) ‘Linguistic models and methods in the study of translation’, in H. Kittel, A. P. Frank, N. Greiner, T. Hermans, W. Koller, J. Lambert and F. Paul (eds.), Übersetzung, Translation, Traduction, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, pp. 285–294. Baker, M. (2006) Translation and Conflict: A Narrative Account, London: Routledge. Baker, M. (2010) ‘Translators and interpreters in the war zone: Narrated and narrators’, The Translator, 16(2): 197–222. Baker, M. (2013) ‘Translation as an alternative space for political action’, Social Movement Studies, 21(1): 23–47. Baker, M. (2016) ‘The prefigurative politics of translation in place-based movements of protest: Subtitling in the Egyptian revolution’, The Translator, 22(1): 1–21. Baker, M. (2019) ‘Audiovisual translation and activism’, in L. Pérez-González (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Audiovisual Translation, London: Routledge, pp. 453–467. Baker, M. and Pérez-González, L. (2011) ‘Translation and interpreting’, in J. Simpson (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Applied Linguistics, 1st ed., London and New York: Routledge, pp. 39–52. Bandia, P. (2008) Translation as Reparation: Writing and Translation in Postcolonial Africa, Manchester: St. Jerome. Barsky, R. (1996) ‘The interpreter as intercultural agent in convention refugee hearings’, The Translator, 2(1): 45–63. Bassi, S. (2015) ‘Italy’s Salman Rushdie: The renarration of “Roberto Saviano” in English for the post9/11 cultural market’, Translation Studies, 8(1): 48–62. Bennett, K. (2007) ‘Epistemicide!: The tale of a predatory discourse’, The Translator, 13(2): 151–169. Berk-Seligson, S. (1999) ‘The impact of court interpreting on the coerciveness of leading questions’, Forensic Linguistics, 6(1): 30–56. Boéri, J. (2008) ‘A narrative account of the Babels vs. Naumann controversy’, The Translator, 14(1): 21–52. Bolden, G. (2000) ‘Toward understanding practices of medical interpreting: Interpreters’ involvement in history taking’, Discourse Studies, 2(4): 387–419. Boria, M., Carreres, A., Noriega-Sánchez, M. N. and Tomalin, M. (eds.) (2019) Beyond Words: Multimodal Encounters in Translation, London: Routledge. Boukhaffa, A. (2018) ‘Narrative (re)framing in translating modern Orientalism: A study of the Arabic translation of Lewis’s The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror’, The Translator, 24(2): 166–182. Buts, J., Baker, M., Luz, S. and Engebretsen, E. (2021) ‘Epistemologies of evidence-based medicine: A plea for corpus-based conceptual research in the medical humanities’, Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11019-021-10027-2 Casanova, P. (2010) ‘Consecration and accumulation of literary capital: Translation as unequal exchange’, translated from French by S. Brownlie, in M. Baker (ed.), Critical Readings in Translation Studies, London: Routledge, pp. 285–303. Chan, L. T. (2016) ‘Beyond non-translation and “self-translation”: English as lingua academica in China’, Translation & Interpreting Studies, 11(2): 152–176. Cheung, M. (ed.) (2006) An Anthology of Chinese Discourse on Translation. Volume 1: From Earliest Times to the Buddhist Project, Manchester: St. Jerome. Cook, G. (2009) ‘Foreign language teaching’, in M. Baker and G. Saldanha (eds.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, 2nd ed., London: Routledge, pp. 112–115. Corbett, J. (1999) Written in the Language of the Scottish Nation: A History of Literary Translation into Scots, Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Cronin, M. (1998) ‘The cracked looking glass of servants: Translation and minority languages in a global age’, The Translator, 4(2): 145–162. Cronin, M. (2003) Translation and Globalization, London: Routledge. Cronin, M. (2017) Eco-Translation: Translation and Ecology in the Age of the Anthropocene, London: Routledge. 239

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19 First language attrition Bridging sociolinguistic narratives and psycholinguistic models of attrition Beatriz Duarte Wirth, Anita Auer, and Merel Keijzer

Introduction The field of language attrition has seen an interesting development; not many research fields’ inauguration can be traced back to a very specific date. For attrition, however, there is a general consensus that the loss of language skills conference at UPenn in 1982 marks the start of the field (cf. Schmid 2013), although the term attrition had been coined before then (see the next section). For a long time, the field has tried to find its own space amidst the adjacent field of second language acquisition; the first studies examined how languages could best be learned and taught to avoid second or foreign language attrition (cf. Lambert and Freed 1982). In the 1990s, the focus shifted from second and foreign to first language attrition. A number of guiding questions emerged, such as what the predictor variables that govern language attrition are and how they impact an individual’s attrition trajectory across time. It was also at this time that the earlier umbrella term ‘language loss’ was subdivided into distinct categories, marked by specific terminology: ‘language loss’ came to be reserved for pathological loss experienced in the case of a stroke or trauma; ‘language shift’ came to denote only communal language shift patterns in migrant communities over time; ‘language attrition’, then, came to be exclusively used for individual language mastery changes (cf. Schmid 2011). Within this newly created framework, individual attrition came to be the focus and questions shifted to whether attrition was irreversible and whether it was mainly the result of reduced L1 use or increased L2 use (cf. Keijzer and de Bot 2018; Keijzer 2020). Since the beginning of the field, clear categories of attrition types have thus been established, and in addition, different perspectives have been taken in order to study attrition: (1) linguistic, detailing specific features and often adopting a contrastive crosslinguistic perspective as an explanation of the attestation or absence of attrition (cf. Schmid and de Leeuw 2019); (2) sociolinguistic, examining how socio-affective variables, such as motivation, modulate attrition (Schmid and Dusseldorp 2010; Schmid and Cherciov 2019); and (3) psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic (cf. Obler 1982; Köpke 2007; Köpke and Keijzer 2019), examining attrition effects in the mind and brain. A holistic approach to attrition, integrating perspectives, and looking across categories and even fields has the potential of advancing the research field. Indeed, the self-carved niche may not be tenable against the backdrop of the context of attrition DOI: 10.4324/9781003082637-22

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that has dynamically expanded over the years. From migrants in the 1980s and 1990s, the settings in more recent attrition studies have widened to expat communities who mostly continue to use their L1 every day (cf. Keijzer 2020). This development is corroborated by psycholinguistic investigations and neuroimaging data, also labelled attrition, that show L2 learning effects on the L1 also in the absence of an international move (cf. Bice and Kroll 2015). The development and the inherent interdisciplinarity of attrition work is also clearly felt in recent studies that use attrition as a case or exemplar to bridge fields that have traditionally been approached from an (applied) linguistics perspective and those more rooted in neuroscience. A case in point is Mickan et al.’s (2019) Bridging the gap between language acquisition research and memory science: The case of foreign language attrition, but also the recent epistemological issue of Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism (2019), in which Schmid and Köpke explore the relevance of first language attrition to theories of bilingual development. With attrition work being intricately linked with multilingualism in a broader sense, it is very revealing that within multilingualism work, there have been strong pleas in recent years to use sociolinguistic backstories and individual narratives as modulating psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic outcomes of multilingualism (cf. Bak 2016). We would here like to highlight Köpke’s (2007) observation that studying the intricacies of attrition is ‘promising for the exploration of links between the brain, mind and external factors that are also of interest in multilingualism’ (10). This chapter attempts to make that promise more concrete. It focuses on attrition as a function of typological differences between languages and takes a more holistic approach to attrition by (1) framing attrition as clearly embedded in the broader realm of multilingualism; (2) moving away from the categorization of individual versus community and, with that, language shift versus attrition (individual multilingual narratives are greatly informed by the community and environment in which they are nested); and (3) using linguistic features to illustrate how sociolinguistic information can influence psycholinguistic outcomes. The ultimate aim of the chapter is to show the complementarity of these perspectives in relation to language attrition and offer theoretical tools for a more holistic attrition framework.

Theoretical and methodological perspectives on language attrition Language attrition research has come a long way since Einar Haugen’s essay ‘Language and Immigration’ (1938) where the term attrition was first coined. More recent research has challenged the understanding of language attrition as loss and as an extreme form of linguistic development experienced only by a small number of multilinguals (see Waas 1996; de Bot 1998; Hulsen 2000; Appel and Muysken 2005; Schmid 2011; de Leeuw et al. 2013; Schmid and Köpke 2017 for a discussion on language loss). In fact, attrition is increasingly viewed and investigated as a non-linear, gradual, and dynamic process that cannot be studied out of context of the broader multilingual context of an individual (de Bot 2007; Optiz 2012; de Leeuw et al. 2013). As Schmid and Köpke (2019: 4) claim, attrition is ‘only ever one side of the coin of bilingual development’ (emphasis in original), and thus, language acquisition and language attrition should not be examined in isolation. It follows that the sociolinguistic setting of the individual in the community modulates how attrition operates in the mind. In other words, sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic perspectives on attrition may have been studied in isolation in the past, but according to recent findings, such a clear-cut divide is not tenable or desirable. Sections ‘Sociolinguistic approaches to attrition’ and ‘Psycholinguistic approaches to attrition’ discuss both approaches to attrition the way they have been operationalized in past work before proposing a holistic attrition framework in Section ‘A holistic approach to attrition’. 244

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Sociolinguistic approaches to attrition Given that sociolinguistics is the empirical study of language use, variation, and change in society, this approach has been widely employed in attrition studies, especially in contexts that used to be labelled language shift (i.e. in communities) but extended to the sociolinguistic and societal stories that moderate an individual’s attrition experience (cf. Optiz 2019; Schmid and Cherciov 2019 for an overview of socio-affective variables in L1 attrition research). Previous studies have established that the most relevant social predictors for attrition processes are the following: ‘(1) personal background factors (age at immigration, length of residence, education, occupation and socio-economic status, aptitude); (2) measures relating to the use of and exposure to the L1 and the L2; (3) measures relating to the attitude, identity, integration and affiliation’ (Schmid and Cherciov 2019: 270–271). It has also, crucially, investigated how these different socio-affective variables cluster and interact (Schmid and Dusseldorp 2010). Hence, sociolinguistic background variables have traditionally been used to control for individual differences. In the following sections, we suggest a change of perspective in order to investigate how individual narratives shape attrition and the sociolinguistic consequences that arise from this process.

Psycholinguistic approaches to attrition Psycholinguistic approaches to attrition have traditionally attempted to model language attrition based on changes in language processes of multiple languages in one mind. The construct of competition has played a key role; competition first appeared in Green’s (1986) model of selected, active, and dormant languages. Köpke and Keijzer (2019: 65) explain that a selected language controls ongoing verbal activity, whereas the active language has an impact on the verbal activity although not selected. According to Green’s model, a dormant language does not intervene in ongoing language processing. Though not specifically constructed for attrition contexts, Green’s model does reflect the constant competition between a multilingual’s languages (Köpke and Keijzer 2019: 65). It also paved the way for other competition-based models, most notably Paradis’ (1993) activation threshold hypothesis (ATH). At the foundation of this hypothesis lies the premise that the frequency with which a multilingual’s languages are used as well as the time elapsed since they were last activated (recency) predicts how effortful retrieval of language (features) will be (Köpke and Keijzer 2019: 65). Hence, the activation threshold of a language is lowered each time the language is activated, facilitating subsequent activation and decreasing cognitive costs associated with activation. Recent studies have challenged the ATH’s seemingly simplistic inhibition/activation relationship in the context of language attrition (see Schmid 2019: 288–303 for a critical review of the topic), emphasizing the intricate and complex connection between a multilinguals’ languages and receptive versus productive language activation, which is not considered in the ATH. Gollan et al. (2005) and Bramer et al. (2017) add to this that lexical attrition can already be observed in the early stages of language acquisition and in L2 learners with no experience in L2 immersion whereas the ATH presupposes a relative balanced language mastery. With competition also governing early stages of multilingualism, psycholinguistic attrition models started to further investigate memory retrieval processes more generally, introducing cognitive psychological theories such as retrieval induced forgetting (RIF) to attrition (cf. Linck and Kroll 2019: 92). The main assumption underlying this theory is that inhibition of certain items leads to reduced accessibility of similar items (see Anderson et al. 1994; Levy and Anderson 2002 for a detailed account). Levy et al. (2007) were the first to invoke RIF in 245

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attrition contexts. They carried out two experiments with L1 English speakers learning L2 Spanish. Participants were asked to name line drawings in either English or Spanish based on a colour cue (green for English and red for Spanish). This picture-naming task included different number of repetitions (0, 1, 5, or 10) and the language of naming. A subsequent retrieval task prompted participants to name all pictures in the L1. Results showed that repeatedly producing the L2 in the first task (i.e. 10 times) led to a decrease in the accessibility of the corresponding L1 item (cf. Linck et al. 2009 for a study using a similar paradigm). The RIF framework thus reflects the dynamic nature of multilingual competition and extended the traditional notion of attrition. To the best of our knowledge, the RIF model has been studied solely in relation to bilinguals. Hence, future studies should apply RIF to the multilingual speaker to provide a better account of retrieval processes when more than two languages are at play and thus to reflect the ecological reality of many attriters. Memory retrieval processing models reflect crosslinguistic influence (CLI) more broadly. Traditionally, CLI has been understood to comprise interference, borrowing, transfer, and avoidance (Allgäuer-Hackl and Jessner 2019: 327). In situations where all interlocutors share the same languages, code-switching might additionally take place (cf. Grosjean 2015 for the notion of bilingual mode of interaction). While, historically, the L1 was understood as a separate autonomous system uninfluenced by L2 learning and use (see, for instance, de Bot et al. 1991), more recent studies – through the advent of more sophisticated online measures – have demonstrated the bidirectionality of CLI (Cook 2016). According to Herdina and Jessner (2002), it is not always straightforward to place attrition within CLI phenomena of interference, transfer, borrowing, or avoidance (see Riehl 2019 for a description of these phenomena) or code-switching. In combination with the temporary difficulty apparent in retrieval induced forgetting paradigms, it may be more fitting to view language attrition as a manifestation of CLI. Both can then be grouped under the umbrella of crosslinguistic interaction (CLIN), coined by Herdina and Jessner (2002). Jessner (2008: 275) explains CLIN as an umbrella term, including not only transfer and interference, but also code-switching and borrowing. Furthermore, it is also meant to cover another set of phenomena, including the cognitive effects of multilingual development. These are nonpredictable dynamic effects that determine the development of the systems themselves. From an integrative perspective that aims at combining socio- and psycholinguistic models to the study of language development in multilinguals, CLIN can be seen as a spectrum that encompasses both CLI and language attrition.

A holistic approach to attrition A holistic model that captures the bidirectionality of CLI and the cognitive-affective integration of CLIN, which also governs attrition is complex dynamic systems theory (CDST). Optiz (2019: 52) details CDST as a combination of chaos/complexity theory (CT) (see Larsen-Freeman 1997; Cameron and Larsen-Freeman 2007) and dynamic systems theory (DST) (cf. van Geert 1991; Herdina and Jessner 2002; de Bot 2007). The most important tenets of complex dynamic systems in relation to language development are its non-linear interactions and interconnectedness of all the elements within the system (Optiz 2012). This means that a migrant who comes to use an L2 (or L3, L4, etc.) more because of new linguistic setting requirements might encounter retrieval problems in other languages due to inhibition and lowered activation levels. Hence, change in one language subsystem impacts other (sub)systems. De Leeuw et al. 246

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(2013: 671) further point out that ‘isolating single variables as explanatory may be unproductive because the impact of one element within the system or subsystems on other elements and (sub-) systems runs the risk of being ignored’. Therefore, one’s linguistic background, life experience and social interactions crucially interact and modulate the language development process. Thus, to accurately predict and explain attrition processes, a multilingual’s full background story needs to be holistically examined: their acquisition process, proficiency, frequency of use, attitudes to the languages in question, etc. In order to do this, attrition researchers (de Bot 2007; Köpke 2007; Optiz 2012) have suggested studying covariation of clusters of attrition variables or ‘compound factors/composite determinants’ (Schmid and Dusseldorp 2010) for two reasons: first, it helps to account for and disentangle variables that are inextricably connected, such as socioeconomic status, educational level, and migration history. Second, clustering social variables as opposed to studying them individually allows for the reduction of the number of participants required in a given study. The intricacies of CDST, including its gradual, non-linear, context-dependent, constantly changing traits, make empirical research very challenging, especially within traditional frameworks that see variance both within and between attriters as noise (Optiz 2019: 55). In more recent multilingual investigations, noise is treated as informative, rather than disruptive, to a better understanding of multilingual outcomes of an individual nested in a given environment (cf. Pot et al. 2018). The application of CDST in multilingual contexts was further developed by Herdina and Jessner (2002). Their proposed dynamic model of multilingualism (DMM) theory builds on the main tenets of CDST and sees attrition as a natural process of language development in nonnative and native speakers (Jessner and Megens 2019: 282). The DMM outlines two theories of forgetting: (1) forgetting in relation to time – that is, ‘the longer the phase between learning and forgetting, the more difficult or less likely the particular recall of an item of information will be’; (2) forgetting with regards to cognitive interference theory, where there is competition between the language systems and thus ‘access to information is reduced because old information is covered up by new’ (Herdina and Jessner 2002: 94). The model therefore captures relatively recent retrieval-induced forgetting accounts of attrition (see previous discussion). In sum, CDST and DMM are holistic approaches to the study of language development that allow individual narratives to be placed at the centre of the discussion and that have the potential to shed new light on aspects that have been neglected in past research, especially complex crosslinguistic interference mechanisms, variance, and non-linearity. Undoubtedly, the understanding of language acquisition and language attrition as dynamic multidirectional processes within an individual in interaction with their environment is promising in creating a meeting link between sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic approaches to attrition. We exemplify these links in the following section.

Languages in contact: the role of typology in language attrition In the discussion so far, we have already highlighted the importance of crosslinguistic interference as an integral part of attrition, recently recognized for the two-way process that it is (cf. Schmid 2011), and the processing effect of frequency and recency of activation that itself is dictated by an attriter’s setting. The role of linguistic typology – the classification of languages according to their structural properties, forms, and similarities and differences – forms an optimal case to better understand multilingual speakers’ attrition experiences against the backdrop of all of this. After all, this factor has proven to be of great relevance in related fields like contact linguistics and language acquisition and can thus cut traditionally separated fields to 247

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result in a more holistic attrition framework. The aim of examining linguistic typology from a language contact perspective has traditionally been ‘[t]o predict typical forms of interference from the sociolinguistic description of a bilingual community and a structural description of its languages’ (Weinreich 1963: 86, cited in Koptjevskaja-Tamm 2010: 453). It would be interesting to extend this to attrition contexts. Language typology has impacted language acquisition studies, creating awareness of ‘key dimensions of language variation that might make a difference to the acquisition process’ and typology considerations allow for a better understanding of factors that can influence language acquisition (Bowerman 2010: 591). Inspired by Chomsky’s research (1959, 1965), the late 1960s and early 1970s saw an increase in language acquisition research across languages, with the aim to compare acquisition processes and thereby shed light on universal features that tell us more about the human capacity for language acquisition (Bowerman 2010: 593). Thereafter, research into first language acquisition started to develop into different directions with a clear formalist/functionalist divide. New angles were being considered including the premise that children may have a richer set of cognitive capabilities than had been assumed. This cognitively and functionally minded approach again led to an interaction with the field of linguistic typology, as inspired by Greenberg (1966) and other scholars. Typology was useful in determining differences between the influence of universal properties and the learning environment, the latter being linked to exposure to a language with a particular structure. Importantly, acquisition success came to be predicted as an interaction between a child’s cognitive abilities to solve linguistic problems and the intricacy of the acquisition problem as a function of the complexity of given language’s subsystems (phonology, morphology, and syntax, among others; Bowerman 2010: 593–594), which allowed for typology to become an important explanatory factor. This line of work became especially prominent in the field of second language acquisition (SLA), where much focus has since then been on mental grammars, so-called interlanguage grammars, that can be subject to constraints on learnability, one of which is linguistic typology (Eckman 2010: 1). Eckman (2010) provides an extensive overview of typological generalizations that have had an impact on learnability explanations given by second language acquisition scholars over time, such as typological markedness and interlanguage grammars. L3 acquisition studies have similarly considered the role of typology, L2 status, and frequency of use and level of proficiency in the languages in interaction (Cenoz 2001, 2003; De Angelis 2007; Lindqvist 2018). In acquisition work, then, linguistic typology has created a bridge between linguistic features on the one hand and their (cognitive learnability) on the other (see Chiswick and Miller 2004 for difficulties that North Americans have learning other languages). In line with this, linguistic distance or similarity are sometimes considered as a ‘measure of language difficulty’ (Hutchinson 2005: 1), indicating ‘how difficult it is to learn the foreign language’ (2005: 2). Extending this line of work, Lindqvist (2018) in her work has taken a so-called psychotypological approach that considers learners’ perceptions of the similarities and differences of certain languages and the effect perceptions have on crosslinguistic transfer. More precisely, her study of L3 written French, in combination with English and Swedish, revealed that the learners’ perceptions of relatedness did play a role – that is, there was more reliance on English as a more closely related language to French compared to Swedish when the learners wrote in French L3. While the author acknowledges a range of limitations in the study, the important role of perceptions as linked to typology should be further investigated, and language attrition presents an ideal setting to do that. Given the important relationship between language acquisition, language learning, and language attrition in order to compare and determine explanatory forces for both processes, the role of language typology still ought to get more attention as a factor to explain language 248

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attrition processes. For this, both the fields of contact linguistics and language acquisition have already attained significant results – typological generalizations – on the role of language typology that should be tested on language attrition or, more precisely, the typological distance as an attrition predictor (see also Gürel 2004; Riehl 2019). Taking psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic perspectives, Riehl (2019) raises the question where language contact has a role in attrition processes, thereby considering both the individual and the community perspective. More precisely, she focuses on contact-induced changes and takes a closer look at borrowing and interference on different linguistic levels. Her study combined with findings concerning typological generalizations from related fields provide ideal test cases for evaluating linguistic typology as an attrition predictor. More specifically, it will be interesting to determine whether greater levels of attrition are found in typologically more closely related or more distant languages. In other words, will a Portuguese speaker in a French-speaking environment attrite differently from an English speaker in the same environment, and how will the effects be observable on different linguistic levels? Will it be possible to make typological generalizations regarding attrition, possibly mirroring findings related to linguistic typology in acquisition studies (cf. Keijzer 2010), or will other factors have to be considered in addition? In line with this, could the psycho-typological approach, as exemplified in Lindqvist’s (2018) acquisition study, also be applied to attrition data, and if so, would the perception of the attriter regarding language-relatedness have a different attrition effect than the actual language relationship (if they differ)? In line with this, to better interpret attrition data, the attitudes and motivations linked to different languages and situations by the multilingual speakers also need to be taken into consideration (see, for instance, Cherciov 2012). In order to capture all of these different aspects, sociolinguistic narratives are essential. After all, they do not only allow the researcher to retrieve some general biographical information from the multilingual speaker/attriter, but they can also shed light on language use and choice in different communities and networks, language proficiency levels and language dominance, language acquisition/learning, language attitudes/preferences and motivations, and the social status and values of languages (Codó 2008: 174).

Further considerations for a unified framework This chapter has highlighted the bridge that attrition phenomena and attrition research inherently are. Using second language acquisition research as a step, the chapter has detailed the developmental trajectory of attrition as an independent research field with clear subdivisions. For years, attrition work has tried to stay within these self-created niches, studying language repertoire changes in either individuals or communities and targeting socio-affective variables as determinants in this process or looking at how attrition is manifested in the mind or brain. In this paper, we have suggested, using (psycho)typology as one exemplar, that such clearly distinct boundaries do not reflect the expansive range of attrition experiences. Indeed, individuals cannot be studied in isolation from the environments to which they move. That is why typology plays such a crucial role: different first language backgrounds may interact differently with the language newly added to the multilingual mix, creating vastly different outcomes, especially given that language backgrounds also interact with other socio-affective variables including perceived language distance. In the chapter, we have stressed the importance of a holistic attrition framework – a framework that is able to take the ‘noise’ that past attrition work has tried to control by compartmentalizing the field into (sub)niches and let it be at the very heart of attrition. In this process, we have tried to make a strong case that a truly holistic approach to attrition requires a merging of sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic approaches to and accounts 249

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of attrition. In this way, various attrition phenomena, from expat (community) language change to the temporary forgetting of L1 items after repeatedly naming items in an L2 or even L3, do not need separate explanatory frameworks. Sociolinguistic background variables have almost invariably been used to control for individual differences in psycholinguistic models, but we do not need to control them. Socio-affective individual differences do not have to be controlled but multilingual narratives should form the basis of any psycholinguistic investigation, explaining how language attrition can operate in the mind and how it interacts with acquisition. Already in 1999, Hansen made the plea for language attrition not to be separated into first and second language attrition and should, moreover, be studied alongside other language systems in flux: first language acquisition, second language development (across the lifespan), bilingualism and multilingualism, language contact, creole and pidgin varieties, and diachronic language change (Hansen 1999). The bridges are already there, and along the way of attrition research, signposts have directed researchers to them. It is time to start using them.

Related topics multilingualism; language and migration; bilingual and multilingual education; psycholinguistic approaches to language learning

Further reading De Angelis, G., Jessner, U. and Kresi, M. (eds.) (2018) Crosslinguistic Influence and Crosslinguistic Interaction in Multilingual Language Learning, London: Bloomsbury Academic. (This book explores the concept of multilingual mind – what it is and how it works. State-of-the-art studies on crosslinguistic influence, crosslinguistic interaction, metalinguistic awareness, psychotypology, L2 status, and language proficiency with various language pairings are discussed in order to explain how learning a new language works in multilingual speakers.) Herdina, P. and Jessner, U. (2002) A Dynamic Model of Multilingualism: Perspectives of Change in Psycholinguistics, Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. (The authors combine theories from second language acquisition [SLA] research and dynamic systems theory [DST] and put forth a new framework to study multilingualism. The dynamic model of multilingualism [DMM] is a holistic perspective that views language development as a non-linear and unpredictable process.) Montanari, S. and Quay, S. (eds.) (2019) Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Multilingualism: The Fundamentals, Boston and Berlin: De Gruyter. (This volume provides an overview of various aspects related to multilingualism, such as societal multilingualism in different world regions, language use in multilingual communities, individual language development, and differences between bi- and multilingualism. The theories and case studies presented in the book contribute to the understanding that multilingualism is a multifaceted phenomenon that should be investigated under different research prisms.) Schmid, M. and Köpke, B. (2017) ‘The relevance of first language attrition to theories of bilingual development’, in Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 7(6), John Benjamins Publishing Company. (This keynote article of the epistemological issue on linguistic approaches to bilingualism challenges preconceived notions of bilingualism and proposes that language development in bilinguals is a dynamic process and crosslinguistic interference is multidirectional. Thus, the authors call for a theoretical framework that can be applied to both language acquisition and language attrition studies. The commentaries that follow provide a rich debate of the topic.)

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Grosjean, F. (2015) ‘Bicultural bilinguals’, International Journal of Bilingualism, 19(5): 572–586. https:// doi.org/10.1177/1367006914526297 Gürel, A. (2004) ‘Selectivity in L2-induced L1 attrition: A psycholinguistic account’, Journal of Neurolinguistics, 17(1): 53–78. Hansen, L. (1999) ‘Not a total loss: The attrition of Japanese negation over three decades’, in L. Hansen (ed.), Second Language Attrition in Japanese Contexts, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 142–153. Haugen, E. (1938) ‘Language and immigration’, Norwegian-American Studies, 10(1): 1–43. Herdina, P. and Jessner, U. (2002) A Dynamic Model of Multilingualism Perspectives of Change in Psycholinguistics, Frankfurt: Multilingual Matters. Hulsen, M. (2000) ‘Language loss and language processing three generations of Dutch migrants in New Zealand’, Nijmegen, 2066/18901. Hutchinson, W. K. (2005) ‘“Linguistic distance” as a determinant of bilateral trade’, Southern Economic Journal, 72(1): 1–15. https://doi.org/10.2307/20062091 Jessner, U. (2008) ‘A DST model of multilingualism and the role of metalinguistic awareness’, The Modern Language Journal, 92(2): 270–283. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4781.2008.00718.x Jessner, U. and Megens, M. (2019) ‘Language attrition in multilinguals’, in S. Montanari and S. Quay (eds.), Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Multilingualism the Fundamentals, Boston and Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 275–291. Keijzer, M. (2010) ‘The regression hypothesis as a framework for first language attrition’, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 13(1): 9–18. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728909990356 Keijzer, M. (2020) ‘First language attrition in the twenty-first century: How continued L2 contact in the digital age fuels language attrition theorizing’, in E. Adamou and Y. Matras (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Language Contact, Abingdon, UK: Routledge, pp. 221–233. Keijzer, M. and de Bot, K. (2018) ‘Unlearning and relearning of languages from childhood to later adulthood’, in A. De Houwer and L. Ortega (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Bilingualism (Cambridge Handbooks in Language and Linguistics), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI: 10.1017/9781316831922.015 Köpke, B. (2007) ‘Language attrition at the crossroads of brain, mind, and society’, in B. Köpke, M. S. Schmid, M. Keijzer and S. Dostert (eds.), Language Attrition: Theoretical Perspectives, Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, pp. 10–37. Köpke, B. and Keijzer, M. (2019) ‘Introduction to psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic approaches to language attrition’, in S. Schmid and B. Köpke (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Language Attrition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 63–72. Koptjevskaja-Tamm, M. (2010) ‘Linguistic typology and language contact’, in J. J. Song (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Typology, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 568–590. DOI: 10.1093/oxf ordhb/9780199281251.013.0027 Lambert, R. D. and Freed, B. F. (1982) The Loss of Language Skills, Rowley, MA: Newbury House. Larsen-Freeman, D. (1997) ‘Chaos/complexity science and second language acquisition’, Applied Linguistics, 18(2): 141–165. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/18.2.141 Levy, B. J. and Anderson, M. C. (2002) ‘Inhibitory processes and the control of memory retrieval’, TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences, 6(7): 299–305. Levy, B. J., McVeigh, N. D., Marful, A. and Anderson, M. C. (2007) ‘Inhibiting your native language: The role of retrieval-induced forgetting during second-language acquisition’, Psychological Science, 18(1): 29–34. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01844.x Linck, J. A. and Kroll, J. F. (2019) ‘Memory retrieval and language attrition: Language loss or manifestations of a dynamic system?’, in S. Schmid and B. Köpke (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Language Attrition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 88–97. Linck, J. A., Kroll, J. F. and Sunderman, G. (2009) ‘Losing access to the native language while immersed in a second language evidence for the role of inhibition in second-language learning’, Psychological Science, 20(12): 1507–1515. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02480.x Lindqvist, C. (2018) ‘Do learners transfer from the language they perceive as most closely related to the L3? The role of psychotypology for lexical and grammatical crosslinguistic influence in French L3’, in G. De Angelis, U. Jessner and M. Kresi (eds.), Crosslinguistic Influence and Crosslinguistic Interaction in Multilingual Language Learning, London: Bloomsbury Academic, pp. 231–251. Mickan, A., McQueen, J. M. and Lemhöfer, K. (2019) ‘Bridging the gap between second language acquisition research and memory science: The case of foreign language attrition’, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 13: 397. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2019.00397 252

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Obler, L. K. (1982) ‘Neurolinguistic aspects of language loss as they pertain to second language attrition’, in R. D. Lambert and B. F. Freed (eds.), The Loss of Language Skills, Rowley, MA: Newbury House, pp. 60–79. Optiz, C. (2012) ‘A dynamic perspective on late bilinguals’ linguistic development in an L2 environment’, International Journal of Bilingualism, 17(6): 701–715. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367006912454621. Optiz, C. (2019) ‘A complex dynamic systems perspective on personal background variables in L1 attrition’, in M. S. Schmid and B. Köpke (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Language Attrition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 49–60. Paradis, M. (1993) ‘Linguistic, psycholinguistic, and neurolinguistic aspects of “interference” in bilingual speakers: The activation threshold hypothesis’, International Journal of Psycholinguistics, 9(2): 133–145. Pot, A., Keijzer, M. and de Bot, K. (2018) ‘Intensity of multilingual language use predicts cognitive performance in some multilingual older adults’, Brain Sciences, 8(5): 1–27. https://doi.org/10.3390/ brainsci8050092 Riehl, C. M. (2019) ‘Language contact and language attrition’, in M. S. Schmid and B. Köpke (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Language Attrition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 49–60. Schmid, M. S. (2011) Language Attrition: Key Topics in Sociolinguistics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schmid, M. S. (2013) ‘First language attrition’, WIREs Cognitive Science, 4: 117–123. https://doi. org/10.1002/wcs.1218 Schmid, M. S. (2019) ‘The impact of frequency of use and length of residence on L1 attrition’, in M. S. Schmid and B. Köpke (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Language Attrition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 288–303. Schmid, M. S. and Cherciov, M. (2019) ‘Introduction to extralinguistic factors in language attrition’, in M. S. Schmid and B. Köpke (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Language Attrition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 267–276. Schmid, M. S. and de Leeuw, E. (2019) ‘Introduction to linguistic factors in language attrition’, in M. S. Schmid and B. Köpke (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Language Attrition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 181–190. Schmid, M. S. and Dusseldorp, E. (2010) ‘Quantitative analyses in a multivariate study of language attrition: The impact of extralinguistic factors’, Second Language Research, 26(1): 125–160. Schmid, M. S. and Köpke, B. (2017) ‘The relevance of first language attrition to theories of bilingual development’, Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 7(6): 637–667. https://doi.org/10.1075/ lab.17058.sch Schmid, M. S. and Köpke, B. (2019) ‘Introduction’, in M. S. Schmid and B. Köpke (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Language Attrition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 1–4. van Geert, P. (1991) ‘A dynamic systems model of cognitive and language growth’, Psychological Review, 98(1): 3–53. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.98.1.3 Waas, M. (1996) Language Attrition Downunder: German Speakers in Australia, Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Weinreich, U. (1963) Languages in Contact, 2nd ed., The Hague: Mouton.

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20 Clinical linguistics Vesna Stojanovik, Michael Perkins, and Sara Howard

Introduction Clinical linguistics involves the study of how language and communication may be impaired. In its narrowest and most applied sense, it focuses on the use of linguistics to describe, analyze, assess, diagnose, and treat communication disorders (e.g. Crystal 1981). However, it is also commonly taken to include the study of how clinical language data can throw light on the nature, development, and use of neurotypical language and thus to contribute to the advancement of linguistic theory (Ball et al. 2008). Indeed, it is sometimes only through the analysis of language breakdown that we become aware of hitherto unknown features of language structure and function, and this is part of the reason that the discipline has grown considerably over the last few decades. More recently, Cummings (2008) adopts a definition of clinical linguistics to include ‘disorders which result from disruption to the wider processes of language transmission and reception and disorders of the vegetative functions that are an evolutionary precursor to language’ (p. 1). This definition views clinical linguistics not only as an academic discipline but also as being part of clinical practice, which covers disorders that speech and language therapists encounter in different clinical contexts. The scope of clinical linguistics is broad, to say the least. No level of language organization from phonetics to discourse is immune to impairment, with problems manifested in both the production and comprehension of spoken, written, and signed language across the human lifespan. The subject matter of clinical linguistics is thus amenable to study through virtually all branches of linguistics, and various sub-specialisms have been accorded their own distinct labels, such as clinical phonetics, clinical phonology, clinical pragmatics, and clinical sociolinguistics. The fact that communication disorders may be manifested linguistically does not necessarily mean that they will always have a specifically linguistic cause, and thus, if we are interested in explaining them fully, we are inevitably drawn beyond linguistics to its interfaces with other domains such as physiology, neurology, general, cognition and social interaction. One might thus define clinical linguistics as ‘the study of communication disorders, with specific emphasis on their linguistic aspects (while not forgetting how these interact with other domains)’. This crossdisciplinary perspective is a key feature of clinical linguistics. Such a breadth of focus notwithstanding, establishing a clear causal link between behavioural symptoms and underlying deficits is not always easy. For example, there is no clear consensus regarding whether developmental 254

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language disorder (DLD, a condition found in otherwise healthy children who have problems with speech and language) is best attributed to underlying deficits in auditory perception, general cognitive processing, a dedicated language module or some combination of all of these (see below for further discussion). Nevertheless, it is still possible to characterize the linguistic features of DLD precisely enough to be able to design assessments and remedial programmes. It is this key grounding in linguistics – and in particular, the focus on linguistic behaviour – which distinguishes clinical linguistics from related fields such as neurolinguistics and speech and language pathology, which accord primary importance to the underlying causes of communication disorders. This important distinction was first outlined by Crystal (1980) in terms of the ‘behavioural’ as opposed to the ‘medical’ model of language pathology.

Historical perspectives Our understanding of communication impairment has come a long way in the last hundred years. As late as the 1920s, Scripture (1923) was still attributing a particular variety of lisping to neurosis with a recommendation that it be treated using ‘[a]rsenic, quinine, strychnine, and other tonics, cold rubs, lukewarm or cold half-baths, sprays, moist packs, electrotherapy, massage, change of climate, and sea baths’ (p. 185). A major milestone in putting the study and treatment of communication disorders on a more scientific footing, based on the discipline of linguistics, was Roman Jakobson’s Kindersprache, Aphasie und allgemeine Lautgesetze (Jakobson 1941) (later published in English as Child Language, Aphasia and Phonological Universals [Jakobson 1968]), which emphasized the importance of studying systematic patterns of similarity and contrast in clinical language data and relating these to linguistic theory. The assumption that atypical speech or language, however deviant, must still be systematic and rule-driven – and thus amenable to analysis – has remained an article of faith among clinical linguists ever since Jakobson’s work became more widely known in the 1970s. Jakobson’s influence is evident in publications from the early 1970s particularly in the USA, the UK, and Scandinavia, though the development of clinical linguistics as a branch of applied linguistics was given a boost in the UK in particular by the publication of the Quirk Report (1972) which recommended that the training of speech therapists – whose exposure to linguistics had hitherto been largely restricted to phonetics – should be extended to embrace all levels of language organization, and that ‘the would-be practitioner of therapy, whether of speech or hearing, of reading or of writing must in future regard language as the central core of his basic discipline’ (6.60). Gradually from the mid-1970s, former two-year diploma courses were superseded by three-to-four-year bachelor’s degrees in speech and language therapy at a number of universities across the UK, which resulted in the emergence of a new generation of speech and language therapists who were not only more linguistically knowledgeable than their predecessors but also had at their disposal an increasingly extensive linguistic toolkit for use in assessment, diagnosis, and remediation. The linguists who were recruited to teach these students in turn became more knowledgeable about communication impairments, which in many cases influenced the subsequent direction of their linguistic research. The main driving force behind these developments in the 1970s and 1980s was David Crystal, who set up the first-degree course in linguistics and language pathology at Reading University in 1976. With his colleagues, Crystal developed an influential range of analytical procedures for ‘profiling’ the phonological, grammatical, semantic, and prosodic characteristics of developmental and acquired communication disorders (Crystal et al. 1976; Crystal 1982). Versions of LARSP (Language Assessment, Remediation, and Screening Procedure), the most widely used, are now available in many different languages (Ball et al. 2012, 2019). A further milestone was 255

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the publication of Clinical Linguistics (Crystal 1981), which consolidated and defined the field. Although the term ‘clinical linguistics’ had appeared in print earlier (e.g. Baltaxe 1976), Crystal’s book had accorded the term official status, as it were, and clinical linguistics became more widely accepted as a distinct subdiscipline of linguistics. The first issue of the journal Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics (CLP) appeared in 1987, inviting submissions ‘either applying linguistic/phonetic analytic techniques to clinical problems, or showing how clinical data contribute to theoretical issues in linguistics/phonetics’ (Ball and Kent 1987: 2), thus acknowledging the reciprocal relationship between language pathology and linguistic theory. Growing awareness of the inability of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to capture a whole range of articulatory distinctions found in impaired speech led to the development of a supplementary set of phonetic symbols called ExtIPA (extended IPA) (Duckworth et al. 1990), which were officially recognized by the International Phonetic Association and incorporated in its Handbook (International Phonetic Association 1999). Various revision to the ExtIPA have been published, the latest being in 2018 (Ball et al. 2018). CLP became the official journal of the International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association (ICPLA; www.icpla.info), which was founded in 1990 and has since raised the global profile of clinical linguistics through its conferences around the world.

Critical issues and topics in clinical linguistics Given the broad scope of clinical linguistics as a subdiscipline of linguistics, the topics and critical issues covered within clinical linguistics include phonetics and phonology, morphosyntax, semantics, pragmatics, and discourse.

Phonetics and phonology The phonetic characteristics of atypical speech may be captured using speech instrumentation and phonetic transcription, both separately and in combination. Several instrumental methods exist. Electropalatography, EMA (electromagnetic articulography), and ultrasound have each been used to explore aspects of articulator activity: tongue, lip, and jaw movements and coordination in different speech disorders (Cleland et al. 2015; Lee et al. 2019). Atypical patterns of nasal resonance, airflow and pressure, as encountered in speakers with neuromuscular difficulties associated with dysarthria and in speakers with structural abnormalities linked to a history of cleft palate have been investigated using nasometry and aerodynamic techniques (Whitehill and Lee 2008). Recently, studies have emerged for less studied languages, providing normative data using nasometry which enables cross-linguistic comparisons in populations with and without cleft palate (e.g. Kim et al. 2016, for Mandarin; Martins Sampaio-Teixeira et al. 2019 for Brazilian Portuguese). Laryngography and videofluoroscopy allow the gathering of detailed and diverse information about vocal fold activity (Abberton and Fourcin 1997) and spectrography has a long history of application to a wide range of aspects of atypical speech production from an acoustic perspective (Kent 2003; Lundeborg et al. 2015). Clinical phonetic transcription can be broad, when used to characterize a speaker’s segmental or phonemic sound systems, and narrow, when used to capture the fine phonetic detail of speech output in segmental and prosodic domains, which is often required when dealing with individuals with cleft palate (Harding and Grunwell 1996), those with hearing impairment (Teoh and Chin 2009), or those with diverse linguistic backgrounds (McLeod et al. 2017). There are a range of challenges and pitfalls for anyone attempting to make a phonetic transcription of radically atypical speech production (Howard and Heselwood 2002), and 256

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objections have often been raised regarding its validity and reliability. Some of these objections have been met by the development of consensus methods where a final version is reached through discussion among two or more transcribers (Shriberg et al. 1984) and through careful critiques of the flawed methodological approaches which have sometimes been used to challenge the value of transcription (e.g. Cucchiarini 1996). Recently, attempts have been made to use computerised tools to compare phonetic transcriptions, and some of these are freely available to use (e.g. Bailey et al. 2022; https://aptct.auburn.edu). Compared with clinical phonetics, which has a pedigree dating back at least as far as Aristotle (Eldridge 1967), clinical phonology emerged in the 1960s and 1970s at the time when linguistic approaches generally were beginning to be applied to communication impairments. Nonetheless, it has proved a hugely influential and creative force in clinical linguistics. Early phoneme and feature-based accounts of atypical sound systems gave way in the 1980s to the application of natural phonological process analysis to atypical speech production, particularly in developmental speech difficulties, with work by Ingram (1976) in the USA and Grunwell (1981) in the UK exerting a huge influence on phonological analysis in the clinical context, which still endures today (see, for example, Asad et al. 2018; Mayr et al. 2001). Current clinical phonological approaches are drawn from different theoretical perspectives, including optimality theory (Gierut and Morrisette 2005), non-linear approaches (Bernhardt and Stemberger 1998), gestural phonology (Hodson and Jardine 2009), and cognitive/usage-based phonology (Sosa and Bybee 2008), with accompanying debate about the status of phonological accounts of atypical speech data: are they merely extremely useful descriptive devices, or do they reflect actual psycholinguistic processes? Phonological accounts of speech impairment have shown, crucially, that they are not necessarily the product of articulatory constraints but reflect difficulties with the organization and use of sound segments in words.

Morpho-syntax Compared to clinical phonetics and phonology, the body of research focusing on morphosyntactic issues in clinical data is smaller though it has been steadily growing over the last couple of decades to include a wide range of languages and phenomena. One of the issues that has been debated is the extent to which morpho-syntactic impairments result from a deficit in linguistic knowledge or from processing limitations, therefore inextricably linked with physiology and cognitive processes such as memory and attention. The kind of structural language deficits evident in Example 1 (e.g. omission of obligatory clause and phrase elements and problems with agreement and pronominal case marking), spoken by a 51-year-old person with agrammatic aphasia, are seen by some as the direct consequence of damage to a language module, in line with an innate modularity view (Clahsen 2008), whereas others attempt to explain such deficits as a secondary consequence of processing limitations (Leonard 2014) Example 1 and then yeah . well . waste of time . cos mother . here everyday . sit down you know . mm . go and . clean . forget about it . and then er . me said well rubbish that . rubbish . er . doctor come for me [‘.’ = a short pause]. (Perkins and Varley 1996) Similar debates have also been going on in research into developmental language disorder (DLD), formerly referred to as specific language impairment (SLI), where questions have 257

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been asked as to whether the language deficits seen in children with DLD result from lack of linguistic knowledge or whether the language deficits result from non-linguistic/processing factors and the role played by the developmental process itself. Some argue, for example, that the purported modular independence of linguistic and cognitive functions found in adults is not present – at least to such a large extent – in infants and is largely a consequence of maturation. Thus, early difficulties of non-linguistic nature may impact on other processing areas including language, setting in train a complex chain of compensatory adaptations with knock-on effects for the whole organism (Karmiloff-Smith 1998). The initial trigger may be entirely unrelated to language – for example, a problem with auditory processing or procedural memory (Tallal and Piercy 1973; Ullman and Pierpont 2005).

Semantics Clinical interest in semantics has focused mainly on gaps in the lexicon, problems with lexical access (or word finding), and thematic/semantic relations. The first is illustrated by the fact that it is not uncommon to find individuals with aphasia who are unable to name members of specific semantic categories such as vegetables, fruit, body parts, and tools (Caramazza 2000), although it is also common for individuals with aphasia to retrieve common words (Schuchard and Middleton 2018). This is sometimes seen as the direct consequence of a lack of conceptual knowledge rather than as a purely semantic problem. In many cases, though, there is clear conceptual understanding but an inability to retrieve a word and link it to its referent, as in Example 2 from a conversation involving P who has anomic aphasia. Example 2 T P

can you tell me what you are wearing on your wrist? [pointing to his watch] it’s er – [sighs] what I put on my hair on . er not my hair . er – [tuts] put it right er . [sighs] dear dear dear get it . I’ll get it in a minute [looks at watch and shakes his head] it’s not going through.

The issues that have been discussed in the literature include how theoretical models of lexical access can be applied to clinical data (Schwartz et al. 2006). Within the literature on developmental language disorders, topics have revolved around the underlying nature of word finding difficulties, such as phonological and semantic representations, the size and depth of the lexicon, and how lexical skills are acquired compared to typically developing peers.

Pragmatics and discourse Pragmatics and discourse analysis have proved particularly helpful in characterizing the communication difficulties manifested in conditions, such as autism spectrum disorders, traumatic brain injury (TBI), and right hemisphere brain damage (RHD), whose underlying causes are usually seen as being primarily neurological and cognitive rather than linguistic. People with autism, for example, can find it difficult to work out precisely what others mean by what they say, as in Example 3: Example 3 Adult: Child with autism: 258

can you turn the page over? yes (makes no move to turn the page)

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Individuals with TBI are known for wandering off topic, as in Example 4: Example 4 I have got faults and . my biggest fault is . I do enjoy sport . it’s something that I’ve always done . I’ve done it all my life . I’ve nothing but respect for my mother and father and . my sister . and basically sir . I’ve only come to this conclusion this last two months . and . as far as I’m concerned . my sister doesn’t exist. (Perkins et al. 1995: 305) The challenge for clinical linguists is to explain such behaviours in ways which are both theoretically coherent and practically useful. Extensive use has been made of constructs and concepts from pragmatic theories, such as speech act theory, Gricean conversational implicature, and relevance theory to characterize pragmatically anomalous communication, but although these provide a useful set of descriptive labels for assessment purposes (e.g. we could describe Example 3 in terms of a lack of illocutionary uptake on the part of the child or a failure to derive the adult’s intended implicature), in explanatory terms we are still only scratching the surface. For example, how do we differentiate between symptoms and causes for remedial purposes? An alternative, non-reductionist approach is to see pragmatic and discourse impairment as being located in the social space constituted by communicating dyads and groups rather than being solely attributable to an underlying deficit within an individual. A number of studies using conversation analysis, for example, have shown that people with neurological and/or cognitive deficits who have been diagnosed with pragmatic impairment on the basis of formal assessments in laboratory conditions are still, nonetheless, capable of considerable pragmatic sophistication outside the constraints of the testing situation (e.g. Schegloff 2003). A related line of research, which gives equal weight to the contribution of the conversational partner, has demonstrated that in some cases, the effect of some supposed deficit within an individual may be exacerbated – or alternatively ‘neutralized’ – at the level of the dyad by the actions of the interlocutor (Muskett et al. 2010). One way of integrating these various different perspectives is to see pragmatic/discourse impairment not as some unitary condition uniquely caused by an underlying neurological or cognitive deficit within the individual, nor as being a purely socially construct, but instead as an epiphenomenal consequence of all of these. The so-called emergentist account sees pragmatic and discourse problems as a by-product of the way in which neurological, cognitive, linguistic, and even sensorimotor difficulties play out in dyadic or group interaction (Perkins 2008). Such an approach also acknowledges the fact that pragmatic impairment is not a unitary condition. Indeed, the label has been applied to a wide array of disparate behaviours in addition to those already illustrated, such as problems with fluency, prosody, lexical selection, cohesion, eye contact, turn taking, stylistic variation, and sociolinguistic sensitivity (Perkins 2007).

Current contributions and research Within the field of clinical phonetics and phonology, current contributions include work on how to use a psycholinguistic framework for the diagnosis and treatment of speech disorders. Terband et al. (2019) propose a process-oriented approach which entails a distinction between developmental delay and developmental disorder. The approach assumes a very detailed analysis of speech production and perception, applying concepts from phonetics and phonology, such as phonological representations and phonotactic rules. These process-oriented approaches 259

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have been used successfully in recent studies (Iuzzini-Seigel et al. 2015; Terband et al. 2018; Geronikou and Rees 2016). The last couple of decades have also seen a significant increase in research on phonological profiles in typically and atypically developing children speaking different languages, such as Putonghua (a standard spoken form of modern Mandarin Chinese) (Wu et al. 2020); Vietnamese (Le et al. 2022). Other recent research developments include the creation of speech corpora of individuals with speech/language/communication disorders, which are invaluable resources for education and research. The DisorderedSpeechBank is a venture initiated by Nicole Müller and Martin Ball in 2015. The project was later renamed DELAD, (Database Enterprise for Language and Speech Disorders) and is currently in progress, with researchers currently working on a number of languages, including Catalan, Croatian, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Irish, Norwegian, Polish, Spanish, Swedish, and Welsh (Lee et al. 2022). Furthermore, while phonological analyses have traditionally focused on single word production, research over the past 15 years has pointed to the value of examining the phonetics and phonology of longer utterances and in particular how connected speech processes and the organization of words into longer prosodic domains also demonstrates consistent patterns and strategies which can be directly related to speaker intelligibility, where a speaker’s intelligibility in single words may differ radically from their intelligibility in longer utterances (Howard 2007). Recently, the connected speech transcription protocol (CoST-P) was developed and trialled on the transcription of speech of children with childhood apraxia of speech (Barrett et al. 2020). Although preliminary in nature, the protocol is promising, and it provides information on features unique to connected speech, such as the presence of inappropriate inter-word segregation and juncture, but future research is needed to determine whether features such as juncture may be beneficial in the assessment and diagnoses of clinical cases. Regarding current research into morpho-syntax and its clinical linguistic applications, the current state of affairs seems to be one of emerging new data from less studied languages and perhaps less focus on specific theoretical approaches and more emphasis and acknowledgement of the fact that impairments, such as aphasia and DLD, have non-linguistic underlying mechanisms. Although aphasia and DLD have attracted the most attention from clinical linguists because of the supposedly specifically linguistic nature of the impairment, they are in fact frequently accompanied by non-linguistic problems, and it would probably be more accurate to regard them as one end of a continuum of linguistic-cognitive disorders. For example, there has been a thriving body of research into deficits in phonological short-term memory being one of the underlying mechanisms of the language difficulties of children with DLD and a possible clinical marker (Gathercole and Baddeley 1990; Graf Estes et al. 2007; Taha et al. 2021). Furthermore, a growing body of research has also been documenting non-linguistic deficits in aphasia and correlations between linguistic and non-linguistic deficits (Gonzalez et al. 2020). Recent research in the domain of pragmatics and discourse has been building further on the seminal work by Herbert Paul Grice, by focusing on communicative intentions of the speaker during communication where communicative intentions are situated in a model of mental state attributions. Using such a framework allows one to explain pragmatic impairments as limitations in the ability to attribute mental states (mentalizing) essential for effective communication (Cummings 2021). Mentalizing skills can be targeted in interventions, and there is a growing body of evidence (Parsons et al. 2017) about the possible effectiveness of such interventions in children with autism spectrum disorder. 260

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Main research methods The linguistics tradition Because of its inherent interdisciplinarity, clinical linguistics embraces a wide range of research methods, including the linguistic tradition and the social and medical sciences. The core of the discipline, with its roots in the earlier work of Jakobson and Crystal, has been the qualitative research paradigms of mainstream linguistics. One strong tradition, typified by Crystal’s language profiles (Crystal 1982), is that of linguistic fieldwork and language description. In the case of clinical linguistics, the ‘field’ is typically the speech and language therapy clinic/or another clinical setting. In this tradition, the emphasis is on naturalistic language data, which is audio- or video-recorded and then transcribed and analyzed. Analysis involves the identification of systematic patterns in the data, making use of either pre-determined or ad hoc categories as appropriate. In both cases, but particularly in the latter, hypotheses are commonly reached inductively, then subsequently tested and revised by returning to the data iteratively. Because clinical intervention usually focuses on the individual, there has been a strong tradition of individual case studies. However, larger diagnostic groups can also be identified based on their linguistic characteristics, and an increasing number of clinical language corpora are available in repositories, such as CHILDES and TalkBank (http://talkbank.org/), as are increasingly sophisticated computational tools for their analysis, such as CLAN (MacWhinney 2000). In addition to the data-driven, naturalistic corpus approach, which focuses on language behaviour and its products, the theory-driven generative perspective on language as knowledge is also well represented in clinical linguistics (for an overview, see Clahsen 2008). Over the years, various categories and concepts from generative grammar have been used as explanatory tools to account for atypical language patterns. For example, the difficulties experienced by people with Broca’s aphasia in understanding passive sentences have been described by referring to the deletion of movement traces (Grodzinsky 2000) under what is known as the trace deletion hypothesis. The differences in the production of wh-questions and yes/no questions by people with aphasia speaking different languages has been explained by reference to the tree pruning hypothesis (Friedmann 2002). Difficulties with tense marking in children with developmental language disorder have been explained by referring to the optional infinitive hypothesis (Rice et al. 1995). Complementing the focus on the treatment of individuals, clinicians also need to be able to allocate each individual to one or more larger diagnostic groups whose nature and characteristics are established using the methods of the social sciences, in particular psychology. These typically involve either small or large group studies using both clinical populations and neurotypical controls in which hypotheses are tested through experimentation and the results analyzed using statistical analysis. More importantly, as the need for evidence-based speech and language therapy practice has increased, so has the focus shifted to creating more robust and higher quality evidence from speech, language, and communication studies where experimental designs are higher up the evidence pyramid than individual case studies (Murad et al. 2016). Thus, clinical linguistics also interacts with medical and health sciences. Furthermore, underlying anatomical, physiological, and neurological ‘causes’ of speech, language, and communication disorders have become increasingly amenable to analysis through technological advances in research methods such as neuroimaging (e.g. Friederici 2017). Another approach, which has been gaining ground in clinical linguistics in the past couple of decades is that of ethnography, which sees communication as an integral feature of 261

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contextualized social action. Rather than targeting underlying linguistic and cognitive deficits, analytical methods such as Conversation Analysis (Dindar et al. 2016; Wilkinson 2008) see communication impairment as a function of the way individuals orient to each other, and are based on fine-grained analysis of interaction, turn by turn, in usually non-contrived settings.

Recommendations for practice Clinical linguistics has informed speech and language therapy practice since its emergence as a discipline. It has provided tools for linguistic analysis of clinical data, detailed description of the way speech/language/communication are impaired in different clinical populations and in different languages, and theoretical frameworks which allow systematic data interpretation and explanation. For example, the theoretical framework of natural phonology (Stampe 1969, 1973) has informed the assessment and clinical practice of phonological disorders. Many standardized speech, language, and communication assessments have been designed based on research findings from clinical linguistics. For example, the Language Assessment, Remediation, and Screening Procedure (LARSP) (Crystal et al. 1976, Crystal 1982; Ball et al. 2012, 2019) has been used widely in different countries to inform clinicians about relative linguistic strengths and weaknesses and inform further assessment and treatment. The work by Susan Ebbels and colleagues on shape coding relies on clinicians using their extensive grammatical knowledge in order to select specific targets (whether that’s tense marking, noun phrases, or verb phrases, among others) to improve the grammatical skills of children and adolescents with developmental language disorder (Balthazar et al. 2020; Ebbels 2014). The extensive work by Mabel Rice and colleagues on tense marking deficits found in children with DLD within domain-specific approaches to language disorders has resulted in the creation of the Test of Early Grammatical Impairment (TEGI) based on a domain-specific view of language, is a sensitive tool used in the clinical setting which allows the clinician to obtain detailed knowledge about a child’s tense marking and importantly to be able to disentangle phonological from morphological problems (Rice and Wexler 2001). Usage-based approaches (domain-general) for explaining clinical data have proven promising in the remediation of difficulties with passives in children with developmental language disorder (Riches 2013). In summary, the literature suggests that research into clinical linguistics has gone almost hand in hand with the development of a range of assessment tools for speech/language/communication difficulties, with perhaps a bit of a lag in applying research findings to inform clinical interventions. Thus, there is still plenty of scope in the field to develop and trial intervention protocols informed by current research.

Future directions Clinical linguistics has grown extensively as a discipline over the last few decades. While focusing primarily on the linguistic and phonetic characteristics of communication disorders, it is typified by an awareness of other interlinked areas of processing, such as neurology, cognition, and social interaction. This inherent multidisciplinarity is also evident in the variety of research methods used, including linguistic, social, and medical sciences. Among its many achievements, clinical linguistics has demonstrated that it is possible to enhance our understanding of language structure and use through an awareness of how it can go wrong. Looking to the future, a number of sub-areas within clinical linguistics are likely to prove particularly influential in the years ahead. Work in genetics and neuroscience, aided by technological advances in brain imaging, has the potential to transform our understanding of communication disorders and the way that language is represented in the brain. Linked to this 262

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is a growing interest in focusing on the interfaces between different areas of linguistic and cognitive functioning rather than on their properties in isolation – that is, on their associations rather than their dissociations. This is very much in line with a recent proposal by Botting and Marshall (2017) in which they appeal to the research community to work together in amalgamating the strengths of the domain-specific and domain-general approaches to describe clinical impairment of language and communication. A related growth area for the study of clinical populations is the way in which spoken language functions as an integral component of a multimodal signalling system together with other components, such as gesture, posture and eye gaze, and the crucial role played by communication partners and the social context. Another expanding area of study, which is helping to refine the distinction between universal and local properties of language, is the way in which communication disorders vary across speakers of different languages and how they may manifest differently in speakers of more than one language. Finally, corpora of disordered language have grown over the years, thus affording the opportunity to understand how the same phenomena may manifest in different languages informing differential diagnoses of communication disorders and intervention.

Related topics neurolinguistics; psycholinguistics; medical communication, grammar; lexis, phonetics and phonology

Further reading Ball, M. J., Perkins, M. R., Müller, N. and Howard, S. (eds) (2008). Handbook of Clinical Linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell. (The most comprehensive overview of clinical linguistics to date, with authoritative contributions from leading researchers in the field) Cummings, L. (ed) (2008) Clinical Linguistics, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. (A great collection of chapters which document the wider scope of clinical linguistics, incorporating linguistic description within speech and language therapy clinical practice) Damico, J. S., Ball, M. J. and Müller, N. (eds) (2021) The Handbook of Language and Speech Disorders, second edition. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. (A linguistically well-informed overview of a comprehensive range of communication disorders)

References Abberton, E. and Fourcin, A. (1997) ‘Electrolaryngography’, in M. J. Ball and C. Code (eds.), Instrumental Clinical Phonetics, London: Whurr. Asad, A. N., Purdy, S. C., Ballard, E., Fairgray, L., and Bowen, C. (2018) ‘Phonological processes in the speech of school-age children with hearing loss: Comparisons with children with normal hearing’, Journal of Communication Disorders, 74: 10–22. Bailey, D. J., Speights Atkins, M., Mishra, I., Li, S., Luan, Y. and Seals, C. (2022) ‘An automated tool for comparing phonetic transcriptions’, Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, 36(6): 495–514. Ball, M. J., Crystal, D. and Fletcher, P. (eds.) (2012) Assessing Grammar: The Languages of LARSP, Abingdon: Multilingual Matters. Ball, M. J., Fletcher, P. and Crystal, D. (eds.) (2019) Grammatical Profiles: Further Languages of LARSP’, Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Ball, M. J., Howard, S. J. and Miller, K. (2018) ‘Revisions to the extIPA chart’, Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 48: 155–164. Ball, M. J. and Kent, R. D. (1987) ‘Editorial’, Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics, 1: 1–5. Ball, M. J., Perkins, M. R., Müller, N. and Howard, S. (eds.) (2008) Handbook of Clinical Linguistics, Oxford: Blackwell. 263

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21 Language and ageing Lihe Huang

Introduction Studies on ageing in language are essential for exploring language development and neurocognitive changes of human beings. Substantial development of studies of linguistic change and the ageing process has focused the work into a multidisciplinary one involving different perspectives and practices. Critical issues in the study of language and ageing include the linguistic decline or disorders in ageing or age-related diseases, the psycholinguistic explanation, and socio-pragmatic exploration of older adults’ communication and language as resources for clinical intervention or successful ageing.

Historical perspectives Different terms have been used in previous studies of language and ageing. This chapter uses gerontolinguistics, a term adopted by Lütjen (1978) when exploring older adults’ difficulty in finding words, to categorize all the studies of linguistic change in the ageing process, sociopragmatic exploration of older adults’ communication, clinical practice of linguistic attempts in age-related diseases diagnosis or intervention, and language as resources for successful ageing. Historically, language features in ageing have been an active topic since early experimental investigations in cognitive ageing and psychology (Burke and Shafto 2008: 373). As early as the 1960s and 1970s, scholars attempted to understand the mechanism of older adults’ speech processing (e.g. Wetherick 1965; Craik and Masani 1967; Riegel 1968) and analyzed the language of older adults with dementia (Irigaray 1973; de Ajuriaguerra and Tissot 1975). Later, Cohen (1979) pointed out that geriatric psycholinguistics is an unexplored field. Since then, developmental psychology, psycholinguistics, and other experimental paradigms have become the dominant research strand of geriatric linguistics (de Bot 2007). Thereafter, scholars conducted more extended analyses of the features of vocabulary, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and narration in healthy older adults and those with dementia in the 1980s and 1990s. For example, age-related declines in the linguistic ability were found in normative studies, including vocabulary decline (Albert et al. 1988), syntactic processing deficit (Kemper 1986), or more repetition and redundancy in discourse level (Obler 1983). Meanwhile, the early influential DOI: 10.4324/9781003082637-24

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studies of dementia communication also arose (Hamilton 1994; Shakespeare 1998), and the study of language in dementia gradually became a focus for clinical linguistic analyses (Davis and Guendouzi 2013: 21). With the development of studies of cognitive ageing and linguistic performance, Makoni (1997: 63) reused the word gerontolinguistics to refer to ‘work in language and ageing’ in general, and then referred to the study of discourse between older adults and caregivers from a socio-pragmatic perspective in Makoni and Grainger (2002). Currently, researchers are focusing more on clinical pragmatics, covering the topics of pragmatic assessment, pragmatic disorders, and socio-pragmatic issues in the interactions of healthy older adults or those with dementia. In this sense, the scope of gerontolinguistics has been expanded. Now this term has gone beyond a descriptive label and has been shaped into a name for a theoretical, interpretive, and applied research field of language and ageing (Huang 2022).

Critical issues and topics Psycholinguistic perspectives Language problems faced by older adults are mainly the deterioration of language ability and linguistic disorders caused by physiological and pathological ageing. Physiological ageing refers to typical physiological degradation, while pathological ageing refers to the neurocognitive changes caused by different factors including ageing-related diseases. Current studies mainly focus on the cognitive ageing mechanism behind linguistic performance of typical ageing in older adults and the language impairment they suffer from age-related diseases (Roncero and de Almeida 2014; Cummings 2017; Sherratt and Bryan 2019).

Physiological ageing and language change The well-being of older adults’ linguistic life is generally overlooked, except that they present language impairment and communication failure (Gu 2019). Actually, typical physiological ageing will also result in language change, in which the most observable one is perhaps voice ageing. It involves a widespread change in the physiology of phonatory organs: including thinning of laryngeal mucosa; atrophy of vocal muscles; relaxation and weakening of facial muscles, chewing muscles, and pharyngeal muscles; ossification and calcification of the larynx cartilage; degeneration of mucosal glands; loss of lung elasticity; hardening of the chest; and weakening of respiratory muscles, etc. Therefore, older adults will experience changes in sound quality, reduced formant frequencies, sound tremors, and decreased volume. For instance, in women, speaking fundamental frequency has a slight drop (approximately 10–15 Hz) as the result of hormonal changes during menopause resulting in vocal cord edema; in men, fundamental frequency rises substantially (approximately 35 Hz) into advanced old age compared with middle age (Linville 1996: 191). Ageing will lead to a decline in peripheral auditory sensitivity (Schneider and Pichora-Fuller 2000) and central auditory function (Lister et al. 2011), and the sound frequency coding function will be weakened. Additionally, agerelated decline is also seen in retrieval of phonological and orthographic information about a word (Thornton and Light 2006).

Cognitive ageing and language decline Current studies show that the fundamental cause of language ageing is the structural degradation of the brain, manifested in impaired processing speed, memory, inhibition ability, and so 268

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on (Shafto and Tyler 2014). Cognitive ageing leads to a variety of changes in linguistic performance. Overall, the ability of word recognition and comprehension declines, the efficiency of word and sentence processing is reduced, and sentence comprehension with complex syntax becomes difficult; language production manifests as difficulty in naming, reduced vocabulary fluency, syntactic complexity decline, and difficulty in recalling propositions and producing complex sentences. Meanwhile, discourse comprehension and production are also affected by the ageing process. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to list all the language features here, but some key aspects are as follows:

Lexical semantics Under such cognitive change in the ageing process, the most dominant linguistic performance in lexical level is the tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) phenomenon, also called word-retrieval difficulty. Although both younger and older adults experience occasional TOT problems due to weak access to phonological representations, TOTs markedly increase across an individual’s lifespan. This is believed to be one of the most typical pieces of evidence in cognitive ageing due to phonological retrieval deficit. Studies also suggest that older adults make more errors in picture naming (objects or actions) than young adults. More recent explorations show that vocabulary ability scores level off in late adulthood, but start to decline sometime after the age of 70 (Burke and Shafto 2008: 406–407). Additionally, there are greater semantic priming effects for older adults than young adults, but the cause is uncertain: larger priming effects for older adults are caused either by cognitive decline or by an increase in the interconnected nature of the semantic network due to experience. Studies also conclude that semantic conceptual representations underlying language meaning at the word, sentence, or discourse level are relatively well preserved in healthy ageing. Older adults may score higher than young adults in the lexical semantics test. However, the influencing factors may vary, including education and verbal experience. The causes for this phenomenon need further discussion.

Sentence comprehension Older adults’ sentence comprehension capacity may be negatively influenced due to working memory decline. Cognitive ageing has a certain impact on individuals when they produce morpho-syntax with excessive cognitive load. In the process of ageing, an individual’s syntactic structures with higher complexity and lower frequency of use will decrease. There is an overall age-related decrement in the complexity of older adults’ speech, but this decrement is more precipitous for certain sentence patterns. For example, older adults tend to use rightbranching construction in both spoken and written language (Kemper et al. 1989). This phenomenon is related to the decrease in working memory capacity, and the leftward expansion structure causes greater burden on the speaker’s working memory, which makes older adults more inclined to the less cognitively burdened form when producing certain types of sentences.

Discourse comprehension The current outcomes of discourse processing and ageing has been somehow equivocal. On the one hand, discourse comprehension is particularly important for assessing age-related processing deficits. This is because discourse comprehension is related to working memory, which requires integrating concepts and maintaining thematic information over multiple sentences. On the other hand, given age-related declines in cognitive domains, the strategic management 269

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of resource allocation may provide older adults the possibility to maintain discourse processing abilities. Some researchers find that the age-related growth in crystallized abilities (the accumulation of knowledge, facts, and skills that are acquired throughout life) may give older adults an advantage in discourse processing, and the previously accumulated experience may enable them to allocate processing resources. Meanwhile, researchers also believe that using discourse-level features, such as the situation model, enables older adults to ‘create a distinct and elaborated text-base on par with that of the young’ (Stine-Morrow and Soederberg Miller 2002). The situation model (van Dijk and Kintsch 1983) regards language as a set of processing instructions on how to construct a mental representation of the described situation rather than treating language as information to analyze syntactically and semantically and then store in the memory (Zwaan and Radvansky 1998), which means that this model refers to representational content over language form. Older adults may have a bias towards top-down processing, but obviously more research is needed to determine why they prioritize situation model formation and other discourse-level processing during discourse comprehension.

Pathological ageing and language deficits Pathological ageing refers to the cognitive impairment of older adults suffering from neurocognitive diseases (such as neurodegenerative disease, stroke, hypertension, and diabetes, etc.), resulting in language impairment, which can be manifested at multiple language levels including phonetics, vocabulary, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Dementia is the general term used to describe a number of different brain degenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease (AD), vascular dementia (VD), frontotemporal dementia (FTD), and dementia in Parkinson’s disease (PD) and Huntington’s disease (HD). These neurodegenerative diseases manifest similar clinical features and linguistic impairment, but their neuropathological origins vary. Language deficits will be typically noticeable from the early stage of the disease. In clinics, many subtle changes in language level are measurable (Mesulam et al. 2008; Ahmed et al. 2013), with the help of effective neuropsychological rating scales, such as cognitive screening scales (MMSE, MoCA-B, DRS), overall cognitive function rating scales (ADAS-cog, SIB, CDR), and language proficiency scales (BNT, VFT, ABC, WAB), in that language-related items are essentially included in these scales. For example, studies have shown that, for AD patients, the pathology may cause damage in the brain for many years, even several decades, before it can be effectively diagnosed (Wang 2019: 613). Yet they will have some early manifestations, including growing difficulty in word retrieval, impaired auditory and written comprehension, empty speech content, and semantic paraphasia. Moreover, in AD patients’ speech, syntactic errors increase and syntactic processing problems appear; discourse comprehension and production deficits occur; in the later course of the disease, the patient’s linguistic competence is severely impaired. From a clinical point of view, however, linguistic impairment of older adults with AD does not occur simultaneously at all levels. Table 21.1 shows that from MCI to severe AD, language characteristic changes appear at almost all language levels, from phonetics-phonology to discourse-pragmatics. Lexical-semantic damage in AD patients’ speech is the first to be noticed by researchers in these clinical manifestations, and AD impairs the sentence construction ability, especially at the later stage (Huang et al. 2022a). However, some researchers have also found that AD patients suffer more in narrative discourse coherence and cohesion (Croisile et al. 1996, etc.). With the development of the disease, there exists a significant difference between pragmatic speech ability of patients and healthy controls, which is deemed as a language marker for 270

Language and ageing Table 21.1 Language characteristic changes from MCI to severe AD (Szatloczki et al. 2015: 4) Language characteristic changes Phonetics-phonology Temporal changes in spontaneous speech (increasing hesitation number and time) Phonemic paraphasia Lexical-semantics Word fnding and word retrieval diffculties Verbal fuency diffculties Phonemic (letter) Semantic Semantic paraphasia Syntax Reduced syntactic complexity Agrammatisms Discourse-pragmatics Reduction in productive and receptive discourse-level processing

MCI

Mild AD

Moderate AD

Severe AD

+

+

++

+++

+

+

++

+++

+ + + ?

+ + + +

++ ++ ++ ++

+++ +++ +++ +++

− −

− −

+ −

+++ +++

−/+

+

++

+++

+: linguistic impairments −: no clinical manifestation

differential diagnosis (Ripich and Terrell 1988; Bucks et al. 2000; Drummond et al. 2015; Ash and Grossman 2015, etc.).

Socio-pragmatic perspectives Decline in language processing capability, such as increased difficulty in understanding spoken language or in producing words or sentences, will weaken older adults’ ability and desire to communicate (Burke and Shafto 2008: 373). The socio-pragmatic study of language and ageing refers to pragmatic and discourse perspective exploration concerning how older adults experience language and ageing. Current research on the pragmatic-discourse level has concluded that, compared with the healthy groups, cognitive-impaired individuals show more obvious and severe obstructive discourse characteristics and insufficient discourse coherence. Analytic theories, such as speech act theory, cooperation principle, relevance theory, politeness principle, and other classic pragmatic theories, have been used to analyze communicative intentions in older adults’ discourse and reveal interaction patterns between them and their interlocutors.

Discourse-pragmatic impairment Discourse-pragmatic impairment is one of the significant language disorders in dementia patients. Therefore, differences in pragmatic communication and social interaction between healthy and cognitive-impaired older adults have always been attention-focused. Dijkstra et al. (2004) examined patterns of discourse-building and discourse-impairing features in conversations between conversation partners and healthy older adults and those with dementia. The former refers to discourse features that contribute to the continuation of the conversation, including cohesion, coherence, and conciseness; the latter refers to features that hinder 271

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the conversation’s continuation. Some discourse features, such as topic maintenance, elaborations on a specific topic, and disruptive topic shifts, can contain both discourse-building and discourse-impairing components. Dijkstra et al.’s study revealed a higher frequency of discourse-building features for healthy older adults compared to those with dementia. Conversely, discourse-impairing features, such as disruptive topic shifts and empty phrases, were found more often in conversations of older adults with dementia. Furthermore, Davis (2005) analyzed the pragmatic functions of the three discourse markers well, oh, and so in the discourse of Alzheimer’s patients, pointing out that the development of AD will influence the use of discourse markers. Ripich et al. (1991) compared the differences in the use of speech act categories between AD patients and healthy older adults; the study found that the use of requestives and assertives presented a significant difference.

Social interaction perspectives These studies include face maintenance and threats to older adults’ communication; image and identity; narrative discourses of old age, illness, and death; the decline and ageing of older adults’ bilingual (or multilingual) ability, etc.

Identity and face issue Interaction between older adults and caregivers has shaped a specific speech variation (Coupland et al. 1991; Nussbaum and Coupland 1995). The basic point of such research is that the interaction between the meaning of ‘ageing’ in the discourse and the identity of individual ageing is a socially constructive behaviour (Coupland 2009: 859). N. Coupland and J. Coupland presented their research outcomes in the 1990s, emphasizing the use of multi-perspective methods (such as sociolinguistics, social psychology, etc.) and paying attention to the social dimension of ageing. For example, their research examined older adults’ language use in reviewing life courses, age-telling or age-disclosure, intergenerational interactions, and personal identities construction. The importance of exploring how AD patients, with various levels of language disorders, construct their identities and maintain face in pragmatic interaction with others is also acknowledged. For example, Hamilton (1994) explored the significant role of language in building and maintaining a relative social identity by analyzing two spontaneous dialogues between an AD patient and researcher. Guendouzi and Müller (2006: 164) propose that evaluating the concept of self-identity is part of understanding the critical perspectives of AD patients since selfidentity involves communicative context, speakers’ feedback, working memory, and social experience. Hamilton (2019) investigates the cognition challenge and face issue of dementia patients in their everyday life settings. Huang et al. (2022b) conclude that AD patients adopt both verbal and non-verbal strategies to bridge linguistic impairments to enhance the pragmatic effects of their identity, which shows that self-identity construction helps them generate a discourse strategy when encountering pragmatic impairment. They will utilize multimodal resources, including prosodic features and non-verbal acts, to help themselves perform speech acts and unfold face-saving pragmatic strategies under the pragmatic compensation mechanism (Huang et al. 2023; Huang and Che 2023). Additionally, in the last one or two decades, the study of individual autobiographical narration based on positioning theory also provokes new exploration of older adults’ identity research in sociolinguistics, which reveals the discursive positioning of the person with both healthy cognition and dementia (Sabat and Harré 1999; Guendouzi and Müller 2006: 150–153). These studies discovered the pragmatic functions of 272

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AD identity and further confirmed that patients frequently retain individual pragmatic awareness despite their linguistic impairment.

Older adults’ interaction in caregiving In nursing and family-care interaction, it has been noted that oversimplified talk is often utilized by people talking to older adults, especially to dementia patients. An increasing number of studies pay attention to ‘elderspeak’, a register of speech used with older adults, described as ‘slow speech rate, exaggerated intonation, elevated pitch and volume, simple vocabulary, reduced grammatical complexity, changes in affect, collective pronoun substitutions, diminutives, and repetition’ (Corwin 2018: 724). Although the intention of caregivers is to help older adults understand and to promote efficiency of communication, many studies have found that the use of ‘elderspeak’ will lead older adults to more communication difficulties, communication skills reduction, negative self-assessment, social isolation, and decline of social communication skills and cognitive function, which is associated with negative health outcomes (Ryan et al. 1995; Williams et al. 2003; Williams 2011). Another rising research topic in this field is communication in dementia caregiving. Individuals with AD experience cognitive and behavioural impairments that affect their ability to communicate, and caregivers will perceive communication to be problematic at each stage of the disease. However, the ways of looking at dementia caregiving and how to interact with dementia patients are not always available in practice. Therefore, practical and adaptable discussions of communicative interactions in dementia caregiving have received a growing interest from linguistics, gerontology, and nursing researchers (Davis and Maclagan 2022). Some communication strategies have been developed to accommodate declining language and cognitive functioning in AD patients, which shows the effort to improve communication quality (Small and Gutman 2002).

Clinical and medical interaction Older patients seeking medical treatment is also a topic that has attracted rising research attention, which includes the linguistic performance of older adults in the interaction of seeking medical treatment, the influence of the viewpoint of life and death on older adults’ treatmentseeking conversation, communication skills and strategies in diagnosis, treatment and care, and conversational features and psychological counselling of older adults suffering from diseases. Additionally, the study of interaction of both older patients and medical staff in medical-care interaction also provokes a series of socio-pragmatic explorations, including older patients’ inquiries and needs for health information in doctor-patient interactions, ageism in medicalcare interactions, topic-initiating and turn-taking in the medical primary care encounter, how social and medical framings of talk are established and blended, interaction for better understanding and execution of medical orders despite low literacy, remote medical service and doctor-patient interaction, etc. These research outcomes will encourage medical staff to present more productive decision-making conversations with older adults. When thinking about socio-pragmatics applied in the study of language and ageing, readers should bear in mind that ‘several threads are interwoven’ (Davis and Guendouzi 2013: 19). Pragmatic research in language and ageing refers to a more general subfield embodied in studies combining various perspectives and approaches from micro- and macro-pragmatics, discourse analysis, conversation analysis, sociolinguistics, ethnography, and other fields. In recent decades, the study of pragmatics and dementia has showed a cognitive turn (Davis and Guendouzi 2013: 23), with some cognitive pragmatic theories (e.g. theory of mind, emergentist 273

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pragmatics, and compensatory adaptation) being adopted for the analyses of pragmatic disorders. This is an important attempt in reading the cognitive impairment mechanism for neurodegenerative disease from the perspective of linguistics.

Current contributions and research Although linguistic decline in ageing is usually associated with widespread grey- and whitematter brain changes, the correspondence between the degree of neural change and linguistic performance is not that simple. Researchers find that a certain group of older adults can maintain relatively good cognitive function (including language) even if pathological characteristics exist in the brain. It is believed that these individuals have different states of cognitive reserve, referring to the improvement of brain neural network connections by receiving education and participating in cognitive activities during their lifespan, which helps older adults tolerate more neuropathology without cognitive and functional decline. The renowned ‘Nun Study of Ageing and Alzheimer’s Disease’ is a typical example, which suggests that ‘an engaged lifestyle can moderate intellectual decline in old age’ (Kemper et al. 2001: 237). Studies in psychology, medicine, and linguistics have shown that increasing cognitive reserve can reduce or slow down cognitive ageing or reduce the risk of dementia. For example, linguistics has long assumed that possessing two or more languages confers certain cognitive benefits, which can manifest in a variety of ways. Bilinguals can shift rapidly back and forth between two languages, sometimes even within a single sentence, which might lead to overall cognitive flexibility and control in their brains (Kreuz and Roberts 2019: 131). By observing the neuroimaging of multilingual older adults, it has been found that they have more grey matter in the subapical lobules. The length of second language use, vocabulary, and language exposure are key factors affecting grey matter volume (Abutalebi et al. 2012). In recent years, studies of ageing and multilingualism have grown, due partly to previous encouraging findings on the cognitive advantages of multilingualism in ageing. In view of this, some studies suggest bilingual patients developed dementia 4.5 years later than monolingual ones (Alladi et al. 2013). But other researchers claim that utilizing language learning as a means to stave off older adults’ cognitive decline needs further research support. Clinically speaking, a consensus has been reached to evaluate the language ability of patients with cognitive impairment and make full use of language as a tool in diagnosis, treatment, and rehabilitation, as language is both a marker and non-drug intervention method in related diseases. However, more linguistic markers with satisfactory sensitivity and specificity are still needed for cognitive assessment, and more measurement standards and explicit indicators are needed for rehabilitation. Current cognitive-impairment-related scales focus mainly on phonological and lexical-semantic dimensions, while less attention is paid to syntactic and pragmatic levels. Additionally, most cases in cognitive assessments refer to induction data, failing to attend to spontaneous or connected speech and the value of speech features in prescreening in disease prevention and control. Previous studies indicate that most language and communication non-pharmacological interventions will benefit AD patients’ communicative skills, in which the lexical-semantic interventions, language activities integrated with physical activities, and intervention involving several cognitive skills (including language) show greater levels of effective evidence or predominantly beneficial results. However, current studies with such high evidence levels are only being produced on a small scale and, therefore, more studies with larger sample sizes are still required (Morello et al. 2017). 274

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Major research methods The study of language and ageing is intrinsically interdisciplinary. Experimental or quasiexperimental research is usually adopted regarding studies with a psychological approach to explore the relationship between linguistic performance and cognitive ageing. Frequently used methods include ERP, fMRI, eye-tracking, and behavioural experiments. They provide advantages in exploring cognitive ageing with normal brain function and language disorders in older adults suffering from degenerative diseases. Based on these methods, research on disorders in different older adults’ phonological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic level has become the mainstream in gerontolinguistics. Both quantitative and qualitative methods such as corpusbased research, cohort studies, questionnaires, ethnographies, conversation analysis, interaction analysis, critical discourse analysis, and sociolinguistic studies have also been frequently adopted (Huang 2022). In addition to the previous studies, there has been a trend to construct large corpora, including multimodal corpora, for language and ageing study. Data in corpora of oral or written discourse are solicited from older adults by using the picture test in the neuropsychological scale, or by repeating a certain classic story (such as the story of Cinderella), or through structured or semi-structured interviews or spontaneous speech in a situated discourse. The most representative corpora include DementiaBank, CorpAGEst, the Bonn Longitudinal Study on Ageing (BOLSA), the Carolinas Conversations Collection (CCC), the LangAge Corpora, and the Multimodal Corpus of Gerontic Discourse (MCGD, China). A new trend in this field is initiating a longitudinal study with corpus construction, as it is known that the decline of linguistic competence in ageing is a relatively slow process. Therefore, collecting longitudinal data is essential for exploring the process of language decline and its underlying mechanism. However, there are few such studies and longitudinal corpora in the world, mainly because the cost of such follow-up data collection and corpus building is relatively high. It is suggested that such longitudinal data be paid more attention and collected at different time intervals with different research purposes. New research focuses on the multimodal study of pragmatic expression of older adults and interaction of prosody, expression, and action in interaction of both healthy and cognitively impaired older adults (Davis and Guendouzi 2013; Mikesell 2016; Bolly and Boutet 2018). For instance, it has been noted that in referential communication tasks for older adults with dementia, deictic gestures, and indefinite gestures have increased, while symbolic gestures and conceptually complex gestures have decreased (Glosser et al. 1998; Carlomagno et al. 2005). Non-verbal performance is considered an important aspect in evaluating individuals’ pragmatic competence and, therefore, clinicians have proposed that clinical evaluation should include non-verbal features (Prutting and Kirchner 1987). This promotes the development of a multimodal corpus approach to language ageing study (Gu 2019; Huang 2022). Additionally, the ethnographic method also receives growing attention, which requires researchers to conduct face-to-face interviews with older adults in different ways according to various research purposes. Guendouzi and Müller (2006) used this method to collect the corpus of older adults with dementia. Based on this, a qualitative study of individual speech was carried out in speech-pathology clinics and care centres. In this process, data collection, transcription, and analysis are based on conversational analysis protocol, and similar methods include life story approach and narrative analysis. These methods can also be implemented to explore the linguistic behaviour of older adults of different ethnic groups or with specific backgrounds. The chapter would also like to reiterate that the exploration of language and ageing must be an ethical study, since the research object of gerontolinguistics is an ageing human being. 275

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Researchers should observe primary ethical considerations throughout relevant research planning, implementation, and dissemination. Ethical considerations should follow a specific rationale (it usually includes beneficence, nonmaleficence, competence, integrity, compliance, respect, etc.), provide informed consent, and undergo ethics review procedures (highly recommend to read: Horner and Minifie 2011; Powell 2013; Stickle 2020).

Future directions Change of language ability is the direct and external manifestation of the deterioration of cognitive function of older adults in daily life. Relevant research will further enrich the disciplinary knowledge system of language and realize the disciplinary task of describing, analyzing, and interpreting all language phenomena throughout an individual’s life in the sense of ‘lifespan linguistics’, if we may call it this. In this sense, the current contributions of gerontolinguistics cover a wide range of theoretical, clinical, and social significance. Despite several decades of development of the studies of language and ageing, this area is still in its infancy. The psychological approach has contributed to abundant outcomes of linguistic decline and corresponding cognitive-neurological mechanism, but a more profound exploration in different levels of linguistic performance in ageing is further needed, especially the interface of linguistic performance and older adults’ socio-pragmatic practice. It is also suggested that research should be conducted based on large-scale multimodal data, that diachronic discourse corpus should be built, and that the early screening of AD should be improved according to the characteristics of speech impairment. To further explore all these issues, researchers should show due responsibility when encountering the challenges in the context of global ageing and provide a necessary and timely response from linguistics.

Related topics clinical linguistics; neurolinguistics; psycholinguistics; pragmatics; geroscience

Further reading Cummings, L. (2020) Language in Dementia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (This book undertakes a comprehensive examination of language and communication in individuals with cognitive impairment and dementia. Each chapter covers a specific neurodegenerative disorder and addresses the epidemiology, aetiology, pathophysiology, prognosis, and clinical features, along with the assessment and treatment of these disorders by speech-language pathologists. Many examples of language from individuals with neurodegenerative conditions are included to clearly explain the effects of dementia on communication. There are exercises at the end of each chapter to develop language analysis skills.) Davis, B. H. and Guendouzi. J. (2013) Pragmatics in Dementia Discourse, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. (This book is an attempt to address some of the discussed issues by bringing together a group of researchers whose work focuses on interaction in the context of dementia. The authors represent the fields of linguistics, clinical linguistics, nursing, and speech pathology, and each chapter draws on methods associated with discourse analysis and pragmatics to examine how people with dementia utilize language in the presence of cognitive decline.) Harwood, J. T. (2007) Understanding Communication and Ageing: Developing Knowledge and Awareness, London: SAGE. (The book provides a comprehensive framework for considering communication and ageing in the context of biology, sociology, and psychology. It explores communication in older adulthood, particularly in the areas of interpersonal, intercultural, and mass communication, and includes coverage of communication using new technology. The book synthesizes existing research outcomes and builds a case for more positive attitudes towards ageing and for the power of communication to shape such attitudes.) 276

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Kemper, S. and Kliegl, R. (2002) Constraints on Language: Ageing, Grammar, and Memory, New York: Kluwer Academic Publishers. (The book adopts a variety of methodological approaches to the study of language processing, including psycholinguistic investigations of comprehension and production, psychometric studies of the component processes of reading and of individual differences, neuroimaging studies of linguistic function, and neurolinguistic investigations of pathologies of language.)

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22 Forensic linguistics Tim Grant and Tahmineh Tayebi

Introduction – what is forensic linguistics? The scope and naming of forensic linguistics have been somewhat contested and can include areas referred to as law and language, legal linguistics, language as evidence, investigative linguistics, and so on. The recent edition of the Routledge Handbook of Forensic Linguistics (Coulthard et al. 2021) covers a breadth of topics including the language of the law and the legal process, the linguist as expert in the legal processes and other topics such as police negotiations and online trolling. An analysis of graduate programmes in forensic linguistics shows a similar spread – the Aston University MA programme has substantive time devoted to both linguistics in legal contexts and investigative and evidential linguistics, the Cardiff MA programme offers a similar balance with perhaps less focus on language as evidence, and the Hofstra University MA programme, in contrast, appears to focus almost exclusively on investigative and evidential techniques. This diversity of interest leads to broader and more functional definitions. The Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics defines the discipline as an attempt to improve the delivery of justice through the analysis of language, and this puts application front and centre as part of the discipline. Forensic linguistics is a branch of applied linguistics, taking methods and insights from the academic discipline of linguistics and applying them to forensic texts and forensic contexts. Forensic texts can include specifically forensic genres, such as threatening communications or police interview interactions, and also more incidental texts that accidentally become part of court proceedings. Thus, for example, an innocuous series of text messages may suggest that an individual was alive at a certain point in time, if it can be demonstrated that they were indeed the author of those messages, or lyrics from a song might be seen as involving an individual in a violent murder. Forensic contexts can include not only police interview suites and courtrooms but also quasi-judicial hearings and public inquiries, emergency call centres, and signup interactions to website terms and conditions. Although forensic linguists may sometimes carry out analyses for purely academic interest, more often than not they hope their insights and findings will be applied. One such application is where linguists’ conclusions can inform an investigation or be used as evidence in a court. For example, in authorship analysis work, the conclusion might amount to evidence that someone had written an incriminating message. 280

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A different application may be where the conclusions lead to improvements in policy or practice. Thus, in work on investigative interviews, research analyses might show how language could be used differently to improve the outcome of investigations. Forensic linguistics is a critical discipline, and a forensic linguistic analysis is one that seeks to make a change in the world, and the defining feature of that change is that it will improve the delivery of justice. This chapter is structured into three descriptive sections each discussing literatures which represent different contexts in which forensic linguists currently work: first, we examine work on legal language and mostly written legal texts to describe the nature of legal language, the problems legal language can bring and some solutions to those problems. Second, we examine context of mostly spoken legal interactions, such as cautioning, police interviewing, and the courtroom, and we examine how studies in these areas have made contributions to improving communication. Third, we look at the investigative context and how linguistic analyses can assist law enforcement investigations and provide evidence to courts. The chapter finishes with a final section that examines new contexts, in border lands of forensic linguistics, where new work is being carried out and we examine these areas as marking the future for forensic linguistics.

Language of written legal texts The discipline area of language and law is often seen to refer principally to the study of written legal texts and quite naturally starts with the description of what is sometimes called legalese. Legalese is characterized by somewhat archaic lexis, including self-referential function words such as ‘whereas’ and ‘herein’, nominalization, multiple embedding of sub-clauses, and the use of redundant or near-redundant lists (see e.g. Tiersma 1999 for a full discussion). Explanations for these kinds of features tend to focus on the need for legal texts to be precise and also independent from change in contexts. Some legal texts, such as wills or deeds, will need to travel through time with unchanging meaning, and the purpose of legal language is often to ensure this. There is of course an issue with legal certainty coming at the price of lay persons’ comprehension of legal texts, particularly with regard to consumer contracts, or lay-legal texts, such as website terms and conditions, and this can drive efforts for plainer legal language campaigns. Complexity or comprehension in legal texts can have legal implications; in the UK, for example, the Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations (1994) stipulate that terms in consumer contracts must be in ‘plain and intelligible language’ and where this is not the case ‘the interpretation most favourable to the consumer shall prevail’ (§6). Not all linguistic legal disputes, however, turn on the comprehensibility of legal terms. The need for precision can give rise to disputes which turn on a tension between what legislators meant or intended and what the written law in fact says. A good example of such a dispute is provided in the case of Brian Haw, a long-term anti-war protestor who demonstrated outside of the Houses of Parliament from 2001 to 2007, often using a megaphone to berate increasingly annoyed members of Parliament. In 2005 the MPs passed a new Serious and Organised Crime Bill, which stated that demonstrations in Parliament Square must have authorization from the police ‘when the demonstration starts’. Haw’s protest was cited in parliamentary debates as part of the motivation for this clause and the intent of the legislators to silence Haw was clear. After Haw was arrested on the basis of this law, he initially successfully argued that that his demonstration had begun before the act was passed and so did not apply to him. This strictly textualist interpretation of the statute was then overturned on appeal on the basis that the intent of Parliament had been to require all demonstrations in the area to require permission. 281

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This case demonstrates a distinction textualist and intentionalist statutory interpretation, and in this there is a general division of approach between the attitude of UK and US courts. Most US courts are more textualist and will pay greater attention to the precise words used, and this has created an opening for corpus linguists to contribute to a number of cases. Lee and Mouritsen (2017) describe cases where the determination of ordinary meaning is at issue and point to the inadequacy of relying on the judges’ reasoning in determining those ordinary meanings. Such cases include whether ‘carrying a firearm’ in a drugs case should include it being present, but in a locked glove compartment without playing a role in a transaction; whether the meaning of ‘interpreter’ should be restricted to simultaneous oral translation in contrast with a person who translated written documents; and whether ‘harbouring an alien’ required some element of concealment, or whether allowing someone to live openly would be enough. Lee and Mouritsen go on to argue that a better approach than judges’ ad hoc reasoning as to the ordinary meanings, or to the use of dictionary definitions, is to instead approach the problem of disputed meaning in such cases through corpus methods. Corpus methods have indeed been taken up by the US courts in these cases and across several jurisdictions – for example, including in California the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals requesting corpus analyses to determine the original public meaning of the term ‘a well regulated Militia’ in the US Constitution. The scope of corpus linguistic approaches to statutory interpretation may be limited to jurisdictions with more textualist traditions such as the United States jurisdictions, but these analyses provide a vivid example of how linguistic analysis can assist in the delivery of justice.

Spoken interaction in legal contexts As it was evident in the previous section, law ‘is an overwhelmingly linguistic institution’ (Gibbons 2003) and is among the very few professions that ‘comes into being through language’ (Tiersma 1999: 1). Spoken interaction pervades the legal system and every legal process, from the first encounter and cautioning to the police interview, court hearing, and the announcement of the verdict. Analysis of the spoken interaction in legal context is an area which has attracted the attention of many researchers over the past two decades or so. One of the most important insights into legal spoken interaction is that all legal texts and interactions and forensic discourses involve ‘deeply rhetorical practices aimed at persuading decision makers’ Heffer (2013: 459). In this context, forensic discourses emerge from ‘a particular context that calls on the speaker or writer to create rhetorical discourse’ (Heffer 2013: 467). The purpose of which is ‘to persuade an audience to act or react according to the speaker’s goals’ (Heffer 2013: 462). As Heffer (2013: 468) notes, forensic discourse deals with actions that have taken place in the past, and seeing that persuasion is the overriding aim in these contexts, ‘the most effective way of packaging the past for persuasive effect is through narrative’. In most legal contexts, the linguistic and discursive strategies gain prominence because it is through the persuasive nature of narratives that conflicting versions of the truth are placed against each other to compete and win the attention of the jury (Cotterill 2003). An important feature of persuasive narratives is how lexical choices and rhetorical moves and strategies are used to construct facts and create a convincing representation of those who were involved in the alleged offence and whether this could lead to miscarriage of justice (Cotterill 2003; Eades 2008). Another recurring theme in the study of spoken legal interaction revolves around the observation that spoken interaction also takes place between the legal and lay participants (see Rock et al. 2013 for a critical review of legal-lay distinction). One particular type of legallay interaction that has over the years received special attention is police interviews with the 282

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suspect, victim, and witness (Edwards 2006, 2008; Stokoe and Edwards 2008; Heydon 2005, 2011; Haworth 2017; Richardson et al. 2019 to name only a few). Although police interviews take place as part of a ‘highly regulated form of discourse’ (Heydon 2005: 4), miscarriage of justice can arise as a result of interview practices and most notably as a result of the unequal power and control that legal professionals have (see Ainsworth 2021). The avowed purpose of police interviews in many jurisdictions (including the UK) is to obtain and record the most accurate accounts of the events in question with the aim being to synthesize that into a written statement. The record of the interview can become ‘evidential object’ (Haworth 2010) to persuade the court. One power dynamic is the differing understandings between interviewer and interviewee as to the nature and audiences of the interaction. Haworth (2020: 155–156) notes that interviewees often ‘tailor their account according to cues from the interviewer as sole audience for their talk, often to their cost’ and that they are often unaware of how their answers will be taken by the court. Further to this, Heydon (2005) argues that the language used by the police can influence the interviewee to provide a ‘preferred version’ of the events in question (Heydon 2005: 33; see also Auburn et al. 1995). Heydon (2011: 2315) also emphasizes the importance of silence as a legal construct in police interviews arguing that the ‘the suspect’s attempts to access their right to silence, to ignore a question or to offer an alternative explanation without explicitly denying an accusation, are all heavily constrained by the discourse environment of the police interview’. In these contexts, the judge and the jury could potentially apply ‘the usual rules of conversational preference to accusation – response pairs’ (Heydon 2011: 2315) and interpret the silence as acceptance of the allegations in question. These pragmatics issues, as Heydon (2011) argues, need to be implemented in such a way as to avoid the threat of ‘adverse inference’. Antaki and Stokoe (2017: 2) point out that police interviews are among few institutional contexts in which the interviewer might be required to use ‘less co-operative and more sceptical standards to what their interlocutors say’. By analyzing a sample of more than 100 UK interviews with suspects arrested for minor offences and 19 witnesses of sexual assaults, they argue that ‘follow-up questions’ by the police often presume that the initial normal answers provided by the interviewee were not cooperative. They argue that the unexceptionable answers are often treated this way so that the police could create a narrative that (1) would be appropriate for the court, (2) ‘could yield a version of events that indicated more clearly what criminal charge could be brought’ (2017: 14), and (3) could not be challenged in a subsequent hearing. The courtroom itself is also a well-studied context for researchers interested in how language is used to create and maintain social power in the courtroom (Ehrlich 2010). Similar to police interviews, research on the language of courtroom has focused on both questions and answers, particularly between lawyers and witnesses in examination, cross-examination, and re-examination (Harris 1984; Woodbury 1984; Gibbons 2003; Archer 2005; Heffer 2005; Henderson et al. 2016). The questions raised by the lawyers are always strategic. As Stygall (1994: 146) notes, lawyers raise their questions in such a way as to be able to control the witness because ‘their assumption is that by controlling what the witnesses say, they will also control what jurors think’. In fact, as Ehrlich and Sidnell (2006: 655) note, the power of lawyers ‘is crucially dependent on their ability to compel witnesses to produce type-conforming answers to these controlling and restrictive questions’. What seems to be at the very heart of most studies conducted on spoken legal interaction is the important role of language in creating a persuasive narrative and construction of facts, which will ultimately influence how judges and juries make their decision and how justice is delivered. While there are so many variations in the legal system in general and in institutional 283

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discourse in particular, as Ehrlich (2010: 372) following Conley and O’Barr (1998) notes, language scholars ‘need to move beyond the mere description of linguistic variation in the legal system in order to understand how language and discourse is consequential for the law’. For Eades (2000) as well, this interest in consequences arises out of a critical stance and an interest in the delivery of justice.

Investigative forensic linguistics There is a strong focus in the forensic linguistics literature on the nature of linguistic evidence that might be taken to court and on the varying standards of admissibility which can allow this. It can be useful to situate these discussions as a subset of the discipline sometimes referred to as investigative linguistics or investigative forensic linguistics. Investigative linguistics was first defined in Grant and Woodhams (2007: 1) as ‘that branch of forensic linguistics which assists investigation’ and more recently has been characterized as broadly offering ‘linguistic investigative advice’ (Grant and Macleod 2020: 141). Grieve and Woodfield (2021) suggest that the term is better understood as a category alongside activity described as language as evidence, but here, we suggest it is better understood as a superordinate to include contributions to investigations that result in an evidential product and those that do not. The term investigative forensic linguist also helpfully recognizes that the linguist might occupy a role parallel to the ‘behavioural investigative advisor’ – the formal job description of what in popular culture is sometimes seen as a ‘profiler’ or ‘investigative forensic psychologist’. Investigative linguistics broadly can be conceived as the investigation of forensically interesting texts to aid investigation and/or provide evidence. The forensic context in this sense will incorporate both civil and criminal contexts and is not limited to admissible evidence. There are various legal disputes that do give rise to linguistic evidence, and these can include trademark disputes (e.g. Shuy 2002; Butters 2010), issues of the meaning of slang terms where textual or spoken conversations have been collected in some way as part of an investigation (e.g. Grant 2017), issues of failures of interpretation in police interviews (e.g. Kredens and Morris 2010), and finally, there are authorship analysis cases, where what needs to be resolved is who wrote a particular text. Comparative authorship analysis, where one or more anonymous texts are compared against known texts of potential authors, can and is admitted as evidence across many jurisdictions. In the UK context, it has withstood appeal in R v Hodgson [2009 EWCA Crim 742], where Malcolm Coulthard gave evidence of authorship of text messages that contributed to Hodgson’s conviction for the murder of Jenny Nicholl (see discussion in Coulthard et al. 2021). While this indicates that comparative authorship analysis can be done well, there are cases where it is contested. One example is the Yukos Oil dispute. In 2005 GML Ltd., the former owner of 60% of the Yukos oil company took the Russian Federation to the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague. In 2014 the tribunal awarded GML a $50 billion compensation, but this finding was contested by Russia partly on the basis of an authorship analysis carried out by Carole Chaski (and later Walter Daelemans). Chaski and Daelemans asserted that the secretary to the Tribunal had illicitly authored more than half of the sections of the Awards text. Coulthard and Grant provided a significant linguistic critique that the analyses of Chaski and Daelemans were flawed because they presupposed that each subsection of the Awards text had a single author. Drawing on Love (2002), Coulthard and Grant argued that this was a particularly naïve assumption for legal judgements. Using Love’s framework on the varied functions of authorship, they argued that no section of the Awards text was likely to be the product of a single 284

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executive author, and in February 2020, The Hague Court of Appeal essentially agreed with this analysis, commenting, The Court of Appeal considers the studies by Chaski and Daelemans to be problematic in the sense that indeed – as argued by HVY – the text of a multiple-handed judgement will not always be written by a single author and that the assumption that the other authors ‘usually at most respond with a single proposal for deletion or insertion” is by no means always valid’. (HVY v. The Russian Federation §6.6.5) What matters in the end is that the arbitrators have decided to assume responsibility for the draft versions of Valasek, whether in whole or in part and whether or not amended by them. (HVY v. The Russian Federation §6.6.10) Another authorship analysis task is sociolinguistic profiling, but it is much rarer for it to be admitted as evidence in court. Profiling attempts to take the writings of an unknown author and create a description of that writer in terms of their social background – focusing on educational level, dialect, evidence of influence from another language, evidence from a writer’s use of professional registers, and even sometimes on the gender and age of the writer. Profiling analyses such as these move from general linguistic observations of between group variation to individual-level predictions and, as such, are always uncertain, and this is one reason that they are unlikely to admitted to court. A further issue is that it is of course only possible to profile an individual’s linguistic performance as opposed to their biological sex, age, or other essentialist characterizations of their identity. Bamman et al. (2014) examined gendered language on Twitter, and they were able to discriminate tweeters who declared themselves to be male or female, respectively, but they also demonstrated that men who had more female followers tweeted with a more ‘male’ language style and that women with more male followers tweeted with a more ‘female’ language style. Such observations suggest that the courts are right to be wary of admitting profiling but also that the outcomes might be useful in the broader endeavour of author search. Author search is a new field (Grant and Macleod 2020) that attempts to assist law enforcement in investigations that involve the search for an offender. In such cases, investigating officers often combine various disciplines (behavioural science, computer forensics, and linguistics) in devising a search strategy to find an unidentified offender. In forensic linguistics, perhaps the most reported author search case is that of the Unabomber investigation, where the search for the offender was assisted by an FBI profiler’s analysis of the language of the Unabomber’s Manifesto. Fitzgerald (2017) describes the investigation and how a co-selection set of linguistic features (Coulthard 2004) narrowed the search to an individual, Ted Kaczynski. Profiling as a form of author search may indicate that a writer is drawn from a set of intersecting social groups, but picking out an individual from a large group is much harder and is currently an active area of research in computational forensic linguistics (see Narayanan et al. 2012; Kredens et al. 2019; Theóphilo et al. 2019). A final area of research in investigative forensic linguistics Is that of authorship synthesis rather than analysis. This is described by Grant and Macleod (2020), who worked with and trained undercover online police officers. Their work distinguishes between identity assumption and linguistic legend building. In identity assumption operations, also known as account take-overs, the linguistic objective is to seamlessly take over and carry on an online 285

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text-based conversation without giving away any linguistic tells that the writer has been substituted at the keyboard. In legend-building, an undercover operative needs to make up a linguistic persona that will be sufficiently different from their own ‘voice’ but also consistent in their performance. Less typical tasks such as these applications are likely to grow as the potential of investigative forensic linguistics is better understood by the law enforcement communities.

Contexts on the edge of forensic linguistics In this section, we examine the varied landscape of forensic linguistics and discuss new and emerging subfields and innovative research. These new areas of inquiry are often created as a result of the rapidly growing use of modern communication technologies and the Internet and may mark a rich and expanding future for forensic linguistics. While advances in technology, the rapid spread of the Internet, and the availability and accessibility of digital and smart devices have profoundly transformed our lives, they have also created a fertile ground for various online illegal and criminal activities, also known as cybercrimes. It can be useful to distinguish between computer-oriented and computer-assisted cybercrimes (Wall 2007). The former encompasses criminal activities that are unique to the new electronic media and did not exist before the days of the Internet technology and are ‘directed towards computer systems or computer-based networks’ (Sandywell 2010: 46). Examples include different forms of ‘malicious software (viruses, worms, Trojans) that corrupt software’ (Jewkes and Yar 2010: 3), hacking and digital piracy, spamming, denial-of-service attacks, and so on. As it would be expected, these types of crimes offer few opportunities for forensic linguists as they are often not language-based crimes. Computer-assisted crime, on the other hand, may be of more interest to forensic linguists as the targets of these offences are not necessarily the electronic infrastructure but are individual users of the new technology. Computer-assisted crimes refer to traditional criminal activities and offences which ‘while pre-dating Internet technology and having an existence independent of it, find a new lease of life online’ (Jewkes and Yar 2010: 3). These cybercrimes can further be broken down to three major categories, depending on the level of physical harm and danger they expose their victims to. The first type of these includes non-violent crimes which do not require physical contact with the victim. These crimes are often forms of fraud and carried out through some sort of trickery, deception, and persuasion. The most common types of such crime can include investment fraud, romance fraud, email fraud, credit card fraud, and pension fraud (Freiermuth 2011; Whitty and Buchanan 2012; Carter 2015), which are ‘exploitative and psychologically and financially traumatic to victims’ (Carter 2021: 283). For example, one recent area of forensic linguistic research is romance fraud, in which the victim is lured into believing that they have entered a romantic relationship with the scammer whose primary goal is to extort money from the victim. Carter (2021: 287), for example, through a linguistic analysis of the narrative of romance fraudsters, reveals that scammers ‘develop the victim’s sense of control and groom them into compliance while manipulating their emotional and communicative environment’ before overtly asking for money. The purpose of such research might be both to help others avoid falling victims to such types of fraud and to help different organizations and stakeholders with proposing strategic preventive measures. The second type of computer-assisted crimes involve activities that do not always inflict direct physical harm to the victim but could have significant detrimental impact on the victim’s mental health and may even lead to suicide. Examples include various forms of activities, 286

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such as cyberbullying, stalking, harassing, abusing, and hate speech, which have been on the rise, particularly over the past few years, due to the ever-increasing use of social media platforms. Recent reports by YouGov have reported a rise in the experience of online cyberbullying amongst 18-to-24-year-olds. Similarly, the Office for National Statistics in the UK have demonstrated that one in five children aged 10 to 15 years in England and Wales have been the target of at least one form of online bullying behaviour. Over the past decade, there has been a surge in linguistic research on various forms of online behaviours which take place through the medium of language, such as online hate and language aggression (Kienpointner 2018; Parvaresh and Tayebi 2018; Culpeper 2021 to name only a few), trolling (Hardaker 2010; Petyko 2019), death and rape threats (Hardaker and McGlashan 2016), and so on. While these studies have greatly contributed to our understanding of the linguistic characteristics of online hate and language aggression and the various strategies that trolls or online bullies use, this is still one of the most challenging issues that policy-makers, stakeholders, and individual users are faced with. One issue in tackling these crimes is that there has been a lack of consistency in challenging and prosecuting online behaviour (Bliss 2017: 174). This lack of consistency may be due to the rather subjective and unpredictable nature of the phenomenon in question. For example, the Malicious Communications Act 1988 indicates that an electronic communication which conveys an indecent or grossly offensive message is a criminal act. However, drawing a dividing line between what is offensive and what is grossly offensive – which warrants prosecution – is uncertain. The linguistic research on offensive language and those on wrongly prosecuted cases, such as the famous case of Chambers v DPP in 2012 (see Gillespie 2012), demonstrate that words cannot be taken at face value and that pragmatics meanings and context play a major role. Furthermore, concern for victims needs to be balanced with Article 10 of the Human Rights Act 1998, which states that ‘everyone has the right to freedom of expression’, which allows them to ‘hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers’. Where and how one can draw the line between expressions of opinion and antisocial and criminal behaviour on the Internet is an important question that requires further research. The final category of computer-assisted crimes includes the most extreme types of online criminal activities, which often take place under the radar in the dark web and can lead to physical violence and harm, sexual exploitation, child pornography, radicalization, and self-harm, among others. Forensic linguists have already played a major role in undercover policing of child sexual abuse (Grant and MacLeod 2020) by bringing together various linguistic tools, such as forensic authorship analysis, sociolinguistics, pragmatics, discourse analysis, and so on, to the investigation of how criminals communicate with each other (Luchjenbroers and Aldridge Waddon 2011), how sexual offenders create numerous personas to approach children (Chiang and Grant 2019), and how online child sexual grooming takes place (Lorenzo-Dus and Izura 2017; Lorenzo-Dus et al. 2020.) Such analyses can apply to other contexts, such as counterterrorism work and other types of dark web activity. For example, suicide websites which promote self-harm have received relatively less attention from linguists. These websites, which often attract vulnerable young adults, ‘allow the expression of more permissive attitudes toward self-harm and suicide’, provide information on different methods of self-harm (Baker and Fortune 2008: 118), and normalize and glamourize suicide and self-harm (Lewis and Baker 2011). The linguistic analysis of such websites or fora can greatly contribute to the provision of help and support for the victims (see Harris and Roberts 2013) and better policing of the Internet, thereby making the Internet a safer place, particularly for children and vulnerable adults. 287

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Conclusions The scope of forensic linguistics is growing rapidly as the methods and insights of linguists in the delivery of justice increase in reach and significance. New applications include using established techniques of corpus linguistics and applying them to statutory interpretation, developing new computational techniques to assist author search, and applying current research on dark web policing to more extended context such as the investigation of self-harm and suicide websites. In each of these areas, we see linguistics being applied to forensic texts and contexts and most importantly linguistics applied to improve the delivery of justice.

Related topics institutional discourse; the media; clinical linguistics; discourse analysis; critical discourse analysis; sociolinguistics; stylistics; corpus linguistics

Further reading Coulthard, M., May, A., and Sousa-Silva, R. (eds) (2021) The Routledge Handbook of Forensic Linguistics 2nd Ed, London: Routledge. (This handbook offers an overview of current research on forensic linguistics and familiarizes the reader with the breadth of topics in the field.) Grant, T. (2022) The Idea of Progress in Forensic Authorship Analysis Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Available as Open Access on Cambridge Core]. (This book is about research and practice in forensic authorship analysis and provides an overview of the existing research on the topic while discussing new knowledge about the nature of authorship and methods in stylistics.) Haworth, K. (2006). The dynamics of power and resistance in police interview discourse. Discourse & Society, 17(6), 739–759. (This article addresses spoken language in legal contexts by focusing on police interviews and discusses various factors affecting the balance of power and control and dynamics of discourse.) Parvaresh, V. and Tayebi, T. (2018) ‘Impoliteness, aggression and the moral order’, Journal of Pragmatics, 132: 91–107. (This article examines the offensive and aggressive language on Facebook and discusses how language aggression is sometimes justified on social media.) Solan, L. M., & Gales, T. (2017). Corpus linguistics as a tool in legal interpretation. Brigham Young University Law Review, 1311. (This paper focuses on the use of large linguistic corpora and discusses how such corpora can be used by judges or those construing legal documents.)

References Ainsworth, J. (2021) ‘Miranda rights: Curtailing coercion in police interrogation: The failed promise of Miranda v. Arizona’, in M. Coulthard, A. May and R. Sousa-Silva (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Forensic Linguistics, 2nd ed., London: Routledge, pp. 95–111. Antaki, C. and Stokoe, E. (2017) ‘When police treat straightforward answers as uncooperative’, Journal of Pragmatics, 117: 1–15. Archer, D. (2005) Questions and Answers in the English Courtroom (1640 1760): A Sociopragmatic Analysis (Vol. 135), Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing. Auburn, T., Drake, S. and Willig, C. (1995) ‘“You punched him, didn’t you?”: Versions of violence in accusatory interviews’, Discourse & Society, 6(3): 353–386. Baker, D. and Fortune, S. (2008) ‘Understanding self-harm and suicide websites: A qualitative interview study of young adult website users’, Crisis: The Journal of Crisis Intervention and Suicide Prevention, 29(3): 118–122. Bamman, D., Eisenstein, J. and Schnoebelen, T. (2014) ‘Gender identity and lexical variation in social media’, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 18(2): 135–160. Bliss, L. (2017) ‘The crown prosecution guidelines and grossly offensive comments: An analysis’, Journal of Media Law, 9(2): 173–188.

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Butters, R. R. (2010) ‘Trademark linguistics’, in M. Coulthard and A. May (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Forensic Linguistics, London: Routledge, pp. 351–364. Carter, E. (2015) ‘The anatomy of scam communications: An empirical analysis’, Crime, Media, Culture, 11: 89–103. Carter, E. (2021) ‘Distort, extort, deceive and exploit: Exploring the inner workings of a romance fraud’, The British Journal of Criminology, 61(2): 283–302. Chiang, E. and Grant, T. (2019) ‘Deceptive identity performance: Offender moves and multiple identities in online child abuse conversations’, Applied Linguistics, 40(4): 675–698. Conley, J. M. and O’Barr, W. M. (1998) Just Words: Law, Language, and. Power, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cotterill, J. (2003) Language and Power in Court: A Linguistic Analysis of the OJ Simpson Trial, New York: Palgrave. Coulthard, M. (2004) ‘Author identification, idiolect, and linguistic uniqueness’, Applied Linguistics, 25(4): 431–447. Coulthard, M., May, A. and Sousa-Silva, R. (eds.) (2021) The Routledge Handbook of Forensic Linguistics, 2nd ed., London: Routledge. Culpeper, J. (2021) ‘Impoliteness and hate speech: Compare and contrast’, Journal of Pragmatics, 179: 4–11. Eades, D. (2000) ‘I don’t think it’s an answer to the question: Silencing aboriginal witnesses in court’, Language in Society, 29(2): 161–195. Eades, D. (2008) Courtroom Talk and Neocolonial Control (Vol. 22), Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Edwards, D. (2006) ‘Discourse, cognition and social practices: The rich surface of language and social interaction’, Discourse Studies, 8(1): 41–49. Edwards, D. (2008) ‘Intentionality and mens rea in police interrogations: The production of actions as crimes’, Intercultural Pragmatics, 5(2): 177–199. Ehrlich, S. (2010) ‘Rape victims in the legal system’, in M. Coulthard and A. May (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Forensic Linguistics, London: Routledge, pp. 265–280. Ehrlich, S. and Sidnell, J. (2006) ‘“I think that’s not an assumption you ought to make”: Challenging presuppositions in inquiry testimony’, Language in Society, 35(5): 655–676. Fitzgerald, J. R. (2017) A Journey to the Center of the Mind Book III, West Conshohocken, PA: Infinity Publishing. Freiermuth, M. R. (2011) ‘Text, lies and electronic bait: An analysis of email fraud and the decisions of the unsuspecting’, Discourse and Communication, 5(2): 123–145. Gibbons, J. (2003) Forensic Linguistics: An Introduction to Language in the Justice System, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Gillespie, A. A. (2012) ‘Twitter, jokes and the law: Chambers v DPP [2012] EWHC 2157 (QB)’, The Journal of Criminal Law, 76(5): 364–369. Grant, T. (2017) ‘Duppying yoots in a dog eat dog world, kmt: Determining the senses of slang terms for the courts’, Semiotica, 216: 479–495. Grant, T. and MacLeod, N. (2020) Language and Online Identities: The Undercover Policing of Internet Sexual Crime, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Grant, T. and Woodhams, J. (2007) ‘Rape as social activity: An application of investigative linguistics’, in J. Cotterill (ed.), The Language of Sexual Crime, London: Palgrave, pp. 1–15. Grieve, J. and Woodfield, H. (2021) ‘Investigative linguistics’, in M. Coulthard, A. May and R. Sousa-Silva (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Forensic Linguistics, 2nd ed., London: Routledge, pp. 660–674. Hardaker, C. (2010) ‘Trolling in asynchronous computer-mediated communication: From user discussions to academic definitions’, Journal of Politeness Research, 6: 215–242. Hardaker, C. and McGlashan, M. (2016) ‘“Real men don’t hate women”: Twitter rape threats and group identity’, Journal of Pragmatics, 91: 80–93. Harris, I. M. and Roberts, L. M. (2013) ‘Exploring the use and effects of deliberate self-harm websites: An internet-based study’, Journal of Medical Internet Research, 15(12): 285. Harris, S. (1984) ‘Questions as a mode of control in magistrates’ courts’, International Journal of Society and Language, 49: 5–27. Haworth, K. (2010) ‘Police interviews in the judicial process: Police interviews as evidence’, in M. Coulthard and A. Johnson (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Forensic Linguistics, Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 169–194.

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23 Linguistic ethnography Karin Tusting

Introduction Linguistic ethnography refers to research combining ethnographic and linguistic approaches. This chapter explores the disciplinary antecedents and history of the field, describes the main research methods, and outlines current contributions in areas including education, multilingual communities, and workplaces and institutions. It identifies critical issues and future directions, including working with practitioners, embodiment and space, and creative and arts-based approaches.

Historical perspectives Linguistic anthropology Linguistic ethnography has historical roots in linguistic anthropology, a field which Duranti (2003) characterizes as constituted by three paradigms. The first was a focus on Native American languages from the 1880s, when Boas and his students began to use linguistics as a tool for the analysis of culture (Boas 1940). Early linguistic anthropologists documented the languages and associated worldviews of fast disappearing North American aboriginal societies. The second paradigm Duranti identifies was a more socially constituted linguistic anthropology from the 1960s onwards, reacting against the formalism of structural linguistics and Chomskyan cognitivism. This approach foregrounds language use rather than the language system, emphasizing the situated and culturally constituted experiences of language users in communities. Duranti explains that this paradigm developed particularly through work on language performance (Bauman and Briggs 1990), primary and secondary language socialization (Ochs and Schieffelin 1984, He, this Handbook, Volume 1), indexicality (Silverstein 1976), participation frameworks (Goffman 1981), and reported speech (Bakhtin 1981). Hymes was an important figure in this paradigm with his development of the ‘ethnography of speaking’, using the mnemonic ‘SPEAKING’ (1974: 53–62) to list the dimensions of language in use that speakers need to function in a given context (their ‘communicative competence’). This expanded into the ‘ethnography of communication’ through Hymes’ collaboration 292

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with Gumperz, a sociolinguist who used ethnographic methods to study language contact and multilingualism. Gumperz was also a strong influence on research in the UK, in part through his involvement with the pioneering Industrial Language Training Service (ILTS) in the 1970s, which analyzed communication in multilingual workplace settings using frameworks from anthropology and conversation analysis (Gumperz 1982). The project aimed to improve communication by challenging stereotypes and identifying the systematic cultural and linguistic differences underlying misunderstandings (Roberts et al. 1992). The third paradigm Duranti identifies arose through the influence of social constructionism from the 1980s onwards, highlighting the encoding of subjectivities and power relationships within discursive practice. This stimulated the development of a distinct approach, concerned with issues like the construction of meanings, narratives, and language ideologies; multiple voices and identities; and relationships between interaction and society. The focus is on social constructs like hierarchy, prestige and taste, and social processes like formation of self, speech community, and nationhood. One distinctive area of work within the latter two paradigms is research in educational contexts. Wortham (2008) argues that the focus of linguistic anthropology on ‘how language use both presupposes and creates social relations in cultural contexts’ (p. 38) has particular relevance for understanding how social, linguistic, and cultural processes are dynamically configured in educational practices. Linguistic anthropologists have used Silverstein’s work on language ideology and metapragmatics (Silverstein and Urban 1996) to examine how societal beliefs about language as a symbol of nationalism, a marker of difference, or a tool of assimilation are reproduced and sometimes challenged by individuals within schools (Wortham and Rymes 2003).

Linguistic ethnography Linguistic ethnography in Britain and other parts of Europe developed from around the start of the 21st century in close connection with US work in the two latter paradigms, strongly influenced by Hymes’ legacy (Rampton 2007), but from a different disciplinary starting point. With some exceptions, language and linguistics have not been as central a concern in British anthropology as they have been in the US. The connections between language, culture, and society have been explored more directly by a number of British and European scholars in areas of linguistics (Rampton et al. 2004; Creese 2008). Linguistic ethnography has drawn on several distinct lines of research in applied linguistics (Rampton 2007), including interactional sociolinguistics, literacy studies, critical discourse analysis, sociocultural research in education, and interpretative English language teaching research.

Main research methods Linguistic ethnography combines ‘the commitment within ethnography to particularity and participation, holistic accounts of social practice and openness to reinterpretations over time’ with ‘a more formalist framework from linguistics, with its powerfully precise procedures and terminology for describing patterns within communication’ (Rampton et al. 2004). This combination is seen, on the one hand, as having the capacity to ‘tie ethnography down’ through pushing for more precise, falsifiable analyses of local language processes, while it can also ‘open linguistics up’ through stressing the importance of reflexive sensitivity in the production of linguistic claims, foregrounding issues of context, and highlighting the primacy of direct 293

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field experience in establishing interpretative validity. While the term ‘ethnography’ is often taken to signal particular ways of collecting data, in a more profound methodological and theoretical sense, it is an approach to understanding the social world which has a particular understanding of the nature of culture and human life and the position of language within this (Blommaert and Jie 2010).

Participant observation and fieldnotes Participant observation lies at the heart of ethnography. It requires the researcher to be present in the context under study, observing what is happening, learning what it means to be a participant in that context by being part of it, and reflecting on that experience. Both the observations of what is happening around the researcher and their reflections on their experience are recorded in fieldnotes written during or very shortly after each instance of participation in the context (Emerson et al. 2011; Creese et al. 2008).

Recording language data Data is also collected on language use. This may form part of fieldnotes, but it is also common to supplement participant-observation with audio and/or video recordings of interaction, enabling analysis of specific language patterns. Dewilde and Creese (2016) describe the value of ubiquitous audio-recording in tracking interaction across speech events. Written documents (paper and digital) are also frequently collected and analyzed.

Ethnographic interviews Ethnography seeks both to understand patterns of behaviour and interaction and to grasp what these mean from the perspectives of those involved – the emic perspective. Thus, participant observation and audio and video recordings are frequently accompanied by ethnographic interviews, usually semi-structured, which provide participants in the research with the opportunity to describe their own experiences, in response to questions and probes. The same participant might be interviewed several times as an ethnography proceeds, as new understandings and questions are developed. As well as recording participants’ reflections and understandings, interviews provide direct evidence of their language practices. Maybin (2006) uses data from interviews with children, as well as from continuous recordings of peer talk, in her analysis of their uses of narrative and reproduced speech to interrogate personal experience. Equally, ongoing informal conversations can be very important.

Data analysis Given the complex datasets which can be generated by these methods, there can be no singular approach to data analysis in linguistic ethnography. A research project might, for example, combine the identification of social theory-informed themes in fieldnotes using a qualitative approach to coding (Saldaña 2016) with micro-level analysis of segments of video-recorded interactional data drawing on conversational analysis (Heinrichsmeier 2020) or multimodal analysis (Bezemer and Kress 2016). Each researcher brings (and develops) their own expertise in approaches to the analysis of language and of culture, and each time faces the challenge anew of managing tensions between a systematic focus on language and a broader focus on the unfolding of context, as well as holding in productive tension the emic perspective of 294

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participants and the etic theory of their own emerging analytic framework (Hammersley 2007). So it is hard to provide a ‘recipe’ for data analysis in a linguistic ethnographic project. Nevertheless, some common analytic actions can be identified. Rampton (2006) describes a sequence including reassembling datasets into groupings on particular topics, protracted immersion in data representing specific episodes, comparison between episodes, and finally, producing descriptive generalizations. He draws on phonetics and phonology, conversation analysis, Goffmanian interactional analysis, and theories of indexicality, taking a ‘slow, close look at the moment-by-moment unfolding of each episode’ (p. 398). The advent of easy and cheap digital video recording has provided new possibilities for analyzing multimodal dimensions of communication. Researchers have looked at the affordances of different modes (e.g. speech, writing, image, body movement, gesture, or gaze) in terms of their limitations and potential for meaning-making in particular communicative contexts and how these are brought together to create ensembles of meaning. Combining observations and detailed video analysis with social theory, researchers have studied how modal configurations contribute to meaning and learning in classrooms and to the construction of particular disciplinary subjects (Kress et al. 2001, 2004). Crucially, focused analysis of language data is carried out and interpreted in the light of broader contextual understandings generated through ethnography and informed by social theory. Unlike conversation analysts, who limit their accounts of context to that which can be grounded in references made by speakers, linguistic ethnographers use their knowledge of the wider cultural context to interpret specific instances of language use. However, tensions persist between the detailed micro-level analysis of interaction and the desire to identify larger-scale patterns. Understandably, many researchers tend to focus on manageable chunks of data: a few minutes of interaction rather than continuous stretches over days and weeks. While patterns of language use can be productively identified and compared across these chunks of data, it is more difficult to map long-term processes of situated meaning-making. A number of mediational concepts have been developed which help to bridge between text and dynamic context (see Lillis 2008 on academic writing and Lillis and Maybin 2017 on textual trajectories). The concept of indexicality (Silverstein 1976; Bauman and Briggs 1990) refers to how particular uses of language point to different dimensions of context, from past, present, or future, at a local or more general scale. The term ‘style’ (Rampton 2006; Eckert 2000) links linguistic choices to social constructs and processes. Concepts like these create a synergy between linguistic and ethnographic analyses, describing the mutual shaping of language and social life to provide insights into identity, ideology, or institutional processes.

Reflexivity and ethics Participant-observation makes the researcher themselves a central instrument of data collection. Therefore, the researcher’s role in producing truth claims in ethnographic work requires serious consideration. An ethnographic approach involves not only accumulating data which attempts to capture insider or emic understandings of social phenomena. It also requires the rearticulation of these understandings within the conceptual frameworks of social science disciplines which inform the researcher’s outsider or etic orientations (Heath and Street 2008). There is thus a tension between the goal of making claims on the basis of the data (recordings, transcripts, fieldnotes, photographs, etc.) and the recognition of the role of the researcher’s positioning, interpretative capacities, and theoretical framings in shaping research findings. A stance of continual reflexivity, in which the researcher interrogates their own role and positionings, is essential throughout in navigating this tension. This includes awareness of how 295

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research participants are making sense of your identity (Pérez-Milans 2011) and of how the process is transforming you as a researcher (Giampapa 2011). Researcher reflexivity is often spoken of in an abstract way, so it is important to point out that it is best supported by ongoing practices of reflexivity, such as keeping a written research journal on a regular basis and challenging oneself with specific questions about the researcher’s role or having regular discussions with other people. One of the strengths of team ethnography is in enabling members of a research team to engage in collective, critical reflexivity through dialogue (Creese et al. 2016; Gregory et al. 2012). Reflexivity is also crucial to the ethics of linguistic ethnography. The requirements of university ethics committees for clear specifications of a research project in advance sit uneasily with the more discovery-oriented stance of ethnography (Copland and Creese 2016). Given this unpredictability, it is particularly important that linguistic ethnographers maintain open communication with research participants throughout data collection and beyond. Informed consent may need to be renegotiated in the field, as the focus develops and as people come into and out of their purview. Regular self-questioning on ethical issues and power relationships is an important element of ethnographic work (Patiño Santos 2011).

Current contributions and research Education Education has long been a key site for linguistic ethnography. Research in this area has helped us to understand the complex and dynamic relationships between language ideologies, identities, pedagogic practice, and learning in diverse classroom contexts. Early work in educational settings was influenced by linguistic anthropologists like Heller (1999), who showed how the legitimacy of particular language varieties was constructed through language choice and turn-taking in classrooms in a Canadian French monolingual school, and Jaffe (1999), who explored the school as a site of struggle in the revitalization of the Corsican language. Studies from a range of international contexts in Heller and MartinJones (2001) traced how relationships of power and inequality in society (often related to colonial histories) are reproduced and sustained in classrooms. Language ideologies and unequal power relationships in classrooms continue. Karrebæk (2013, 2014) shows how everyday practices around language use, even around the contents of linguistic minority children’s lunch boxes, reinforce a monolingual and monocultural ideology. Rampton and Charalambous (2016) illustrate what happens when taken-for-granted social and linguistic ideological divisions are foregrounded in classroom interaction and highlight the value of such interactional data for teacher professional development. As well as critiquing established relations of power, linguistic ethnographic work has enabled us to understand how young people play with linguistic and social ideological categories in their talk. Rampton (1995) analyzes how teenagers of Indian, Pakistani, and English descent challenge dominant notions of ethnicity through strategic use of each other’s languages, a process he terms ‘crossing’. Rampton (2006) builds on this, drawing on another schoolbased ethnography to show teenagers creatively using a range of ways of speaking, including mock-German, ‘Cockney’, and ‘posh’, as well as varieties influenced by heritage languages, to position themselves within school, class, and ethnic identities and to play with concepts of authority. More recent research has shown pupils skilfully using their language resources to navigate class and ethnic hierarchies, including Snell (2010, 2018) on schoolchildren using both local dialect and Standard English, Jaspers (2005) on Moroccan boys using several Dutch 296

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varieties to playfully wrong-foot authority figures, and Milani and Jonsson (2012) on young people drawing on the youth style Rinkeby Swedish and on Standard Swedish, displaying a sophisticated understanding of the ideologies and values systems associated with each. Linguistic ethnographers have also been interested in students ‘voicing’ other voices, often drawing on Bakhtinian concepts of heteroglossia and multivoicing. Lytra (2007) traces Turkish minority students in an Athens school using references to mainstream popular culture in off-task talk to claim a shared bicultural identity with Greek peers. Maybin (2006) analyzes children reproducing the voices of parents, popular culture, and education, with varying degrees of commitment, as they apprentice into social practices. The voicing of popular texts by students has been seen as a potentially valuable educational resource, producing hybrid learning practices which enable teachers and students to fuse authoritative and inwardly persuasive discourses (Kamberelis 2001). However, Lefstein and Snell’s (2011) analysis of discussions of The X Factor in a literacy lesson problematizes this, showing that while bringing in popular culture heightened the level of student involvement, the effect on opportunities for learning was less positive. Another strand of work has focused on pedagogic practices, such as Snell and Lefstein’s (2018) analysis of episodes of dialogic pedagogy or Charalambous et al.’s (2021) analysis of peace-building in the pedagogic practices of a Turkish lesson in a Greek Cypriot school. Linguistic ethnography can explore how policies are being implemented in the classroom, sometimes in ways which differ from the policy’s intent. Lefstein’s (2008) discussion of the enactment of the English National Literacy Strategy showed how the goals of the policy were taken over by habitual classroom interactional patterns. Accounts of teachers drawing on multiple linguistic resources to navigate strict monolingual policies in multilingual classrooms are presented by Jaspers and Rosiers (2021) in Belgium and Krause and Prinsloo (2016) in South Africa. Creese (2005) provides a detailed analysis of how policies of inclusion play out in multilingual classrooms. Much linguistic ethnographic work in education has taken place in multilingual and diverse classrooms. Within this, the concept of translanguaging, people drawing flexibly on all the communicative resources at their disposal, has attracted significant attention (Li Wei, this volume). Rosiers (2017) argues for the pedagogic value of translanguaging as a scaffold based on research in superdiverse classrooms in Belgium. Gynne (2019) describes the tensions between the implementation of translanguaging as a pedagogic practice in a highly diverse Swedish school and practices of language policing. Tai and Li (2020a, 2020b) show translanguaging being used playfully as a pedagogic resource in EMI mathematics classrooms in Hong Kong. Interaction between in-school and out-of-school cultures (Pahl 2007) has been a key area of interest. Early research in the ethnography of communication highlighted mismatches between home and school language use for students from minority groups and the resulting misunderstandings and inequities (e.g. Michaels 1981). Similar issues have been highlighted by Poveda and Martín (2004) working with Gitano children. Madsen et al. (2016) move outwards from school to address the complex worlds and diverse languaging practices of the everyday lives of young people in Copenhagen.

Multilingual and diverse communities Multilingual and diverse communities have provided fertile ground for research addressing questions around post-colonialism, globalization, migration, and mobilities. Blommaert et al. (2005) have described patterns of interaction in multilingual neighbourhoods in Ghent, arguing that semiotic and material processes offer a sensitive indicator of globalization ‘on the ground’. This work is characteristic of linguistic ethnography: drawing on detailed, fine-grained 297

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sociolinguistic fieldwork to give insight into broader social processes. Kell (2015) explores questions of scaling in theorizing relations between the local and the global and the movement between these of practices, text-artefacts, and translations. Ethnographically grounded studies of language competence have been carried out in many multilingual settings. Collins and Slembrouck (2005) include research from Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, and South Africa exploring the production of space through language practices shaped by language ideologies. This work interrogates and challenges established sociolinguistic concepts, as globalization processes force us to ‘reshuffle’ existing ideas – one good example of ethnography ‘opening linguistics up’. The concept of translanguaging has been drawn on beyond education. The Translation and Translanguaging project (tlang.org.uk) aimed to research communicative practices in superdiverse wards in four British cities, using ethnographic methods, providing evidence of people engaging positively with diversity through translanguaging in a wide range of settings, including a market (Creese et al. 2017; Blackledge et al. 2017), a library (Creese and Blackledge 2019), and a karate club (Zhu Hua et al. 2020a), among others. Language practices around migration, particularly asylum procedures, have been the focus of linguistic ethnographic research for some time. This goes back to Blommaert’s (2001) description of the inequalities encountered by African asylum seekers in Belgium, disadvantaged by the systems they encounter which assume mastery of linguistic-narrative resources that they do not have. Maryns’ work identifies the monolingual ideologies built into the Belgian asylum system, including the imposition of English as a de facto lingua franca (2005, 2017). Exclusionary practices and linguistic double-binds are identified by Codo (2011) and Pöyhönen and Simpson (2020), while Jacquemet’s overview of a range of ethnographies (2011) draws out global drivers of such inequality. Maryns and Jacobs (2021) argue for the central importance of analyzing the discursive constitution of asylum procedures, given these inequalities of voice, and the need to engage with local grassroots organizations.

Workplaces and institutions Institutional and workplace language has been another area of interest for linguistic ethnography. Detailed ethnographic research with attention to language has enabled the identification of contradictions within institutions, examining orientations to class in the discourses of child protection social workers (Slembrouck 2005) or identifying the paradoxical formal/informal practices of residential child care institutions (Palomares and Poveda 2010). Shaw et al. (2015) find contradictions between health policy think tanks’ public presentations as independent and their backstage activities engaging with policy-makers. Flynn et al. (2010) argue that linguistic ethnography can provide insight into institutional discourse, particularly the dynamic between its inside and outside aspects, and the role of discourse in enacting institutional power. Another group of workplace linguistic ethnographies addresses written texts in the workplace. Some of this shows workers negotiating tensions around writing, such as Lillis et al. (2020), which identifies tensions between professional social workers’ writing and other elements of their professional practice, or Tusting’s (2010) study of childcare practitioners juggling the writing of observations with the demanding embodied tasks of caring for children. In healthcare, Swinglehurst (2014) articulates the dilemmas faced by general practitioners in consultations with patients managing tensions between face-to-face interaction and the demands of the electronic patient records system. Ethnographic analyses of the complex trajectories of texts in workplaces have illuminated how power is negotiated and knowledge produced textually. Van Hout and Jacob (2008) trace 298

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the production of a news report, from press release to article, highlighting the journalist’s struggles for power and control arising from his relationships with actors and sources. Rock (2017) presents the complex trajectory of production of a police witness statement, showing how the interviewer makes the writing process visible for the interviewee through ‘frontstage entextualisation’. Woydack’s (2019) analysis of the text trajectories of a calling script used in a multilingual call centre provides insights into staff in a globalized workplace negotiating compliance and agency.

Critical issues and topics Interaction and social structure Linguistic ethnography seeks to address questions about language, society, and the relationship between the two, exploring social questions, such as the impact of globalization on multilingual communities, or how class and ethnicity affect learning in schools. Exploring such questions is challenging because it entails attempting to explain phenomena at different ‘levels’ of reality: local interaction and social processes. The challenges of bringing together linguistic and social theoretical frameworks of explanation are formidable. Social interaction can be directly observed, but social inequalities, class structures, and ethnic identities cannot simply be ‘read off’ linguistic data. Broader patterns of language use can be inferred from social interactions. To explore class, ethnicity, or globalization requires theories about broader forces in the social world. Researchers need to think through the complexities of these relationships, and the mechanisms by means of which these different levels of reality can influence one another. Our underlying understandings of how reality works and how we can know about it, that is, the ontological and epistemological framings of the research, shape how these relationships and mechanisms are understood.

Engagement with practice Another critical issue relates to engaging with practitioners in ways that make research applicable in real world settings. The critical orientation of much research in this area is clear from the discussion above, and ethnography’s embeddedness in everyday practice builds in relationships with practitioners from an early stage. However, translating complex research findings into insights which can be used in practice is not necessarily straightforward. De Maeijer et al.’s (2017) linguistic ethnography of collaboration meetings between a multinational hightech company and a research institute shows how distrust can build when there are conflicts between the goals and timescales of academia and industry. Lefstein and Israeli (2015) and Bezemer (2015) reflect on the challenges and rewards of working closely with practitioners in the areas of education and healthcare, respectively, identifying some of the important differences between the perspectives of research and practice and underlining the importance of listening and partnership working.

Future directions Online and digital research Extending linguistic ethnography to engage with online interaction is inevitable and important. Online ethnography raises questions about the constitution of social groups, the nature and 299

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significance of context, and approaches to participant observation. As mobile technologies have made online interaction a ubiquitous part of daily life, linguistic ethnographic research has had to grapple with the ethical challenges of dealing with data which includes communication both face-to-face and at a distance, where those involved in the communication may not even be aware of the researcher’s presence alongside their interlocutor (Tagg et al. 2017). The enormous and rapid extension of video-mediated communication associated with the COVID19 pandemic is another arena in which our communicative practices have changed rapidly, and it is important for linguistic ethnographers to develop tools for data collection and analysis which can incorporate these media into research.

Embodied communication, space, and materiality Another area pushing the boundaries of linguistic ethnography is the embodied nature of communication, combining attention to language with analysis of the semiotic repertoires of bodily interaction and gesture (Blackledge and Creese 2017; Zhu Hua et al. 2020b) and analyzing the importance of space alongside language in sense-making (Zhu Hua et al. 2017; Spotti 2020). This aligns with interests in socio-material perspectives across the social sciences. Linguistic ethnography in Deaf communities and in the study of signed languages has expanded in recent years. Kusters and Hou (2020) brought together a range of linguistic ethnographic studies in this area in a special issue of Sign Language Studies. They argue that linguistic ethnography challenges existing classifications of and ideologies around sign languages and shows the complexity of signed practices in their social contexts, including the spontaneous emergence of manual communication and the complex strategies of multimodal and digital communication used by deaf people.

Collaborative arts-based and creative approaches Finally, there is an interesting strand of recent work which adopts collaborative and arts-based approaches to linguistic ethnography. Moore et al. (2020) present a collection of examples of collaborative arts-based and activist work, much of which draws on linguistic ethnographic perspectives, using approaches as diverse as film-sharing, collaborative photography, poetry, and bricolage, to explore how working together using creative approaches can promote positive social transformations. There is also some experimentation with creative approaches to writing up research; Blackledge and Creese (2020) present a linguistic ethnography as a playscript, taking the reader inside the experience in a very different way from conventional academic research publications. Linguistic ethnography is still at a relatively early stage of development, although its antecedents stretch back to the 19th century. This research addresses broad and complex social questions in areas as diverse as learning, inequality, globalization, and identity construction, often with a strong orientation towards intervention and always drawing attention to the complex interdependencies of language use and social process. Awareness and ongoing discussion of theoretical and methodological challenges is driving expansion of the field. New mediational concepts continue to be developed, and existing ones refined, as new researchers come into this area of work, enriching it with their intellectual histories and positionalities. New technologies open up possibilities both for researching changing practices and for developing new techniques for data collection, analysis, and communication of research. The definition of ‘linguistic’ is being challenged by work which insists on the embodiment and complex contextuality of communicative practices. And the methodological capacity of ethnography 300

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is being enhanced by linguistic procedures and terminology which facilitate a more precise understanding of how culture and social life are mediated through language.

Acknowledgements This chapter owes a great debt to Janet Maybin, who co-authored the chapter in the first edition of the Handbook and provided very helpful feedback and comments on drafts of this version.

Related topics bilingual and multilingual education; language and culture; language socialization; literacy; multilingualism; language and migration; institutional discourse; medical communication; identity; languaging and translanguaging

Further reading Copland, F. and Creese, A. (2015) Linguistic Ethnography: Collecting, Analysing and Presenting Data, London: Sage. (A methodological guide for carrying out research in linguistic ethnography, supported by example case studies) Snell, J., Shaw, S. and Copland, F. (2015) Linguistic Ethnography: Interdisciplinary Explorations, Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. (A collection of studies representing the range of work in linguistic ethnography) Tusting, K. (ed.) (2020) The Routledge Handbook of Linguistic Ethnography, Abingdon, UK: Routledge. (A collection of chapters from scholars active in the field of linguistic ethnography, exploring historical antecedents, key concepts, methods, and examples of linguistic ethnography in a range of settings)

References Bakhtin, M. (1981 [1935]) ‘Discourse in the novel’, in M. Holquist (ed.), The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin (translated by C. Emerson and M. Holquist), Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, pp. 259–422. Bauman, R. and Briggs, C. (1990) ‘Poetics and performance as critical perspectives on language and social life’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 19: 59–88. Bezemer, J. (2015) ‘Partnerships in research: Doing linguistic ethnography with and for practitioners’, in J. Snell S. Shaw and F. Copland (eds.), Linguistic Ethnography: Interdisciplinary Explorations, Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 207–224. Bezemer, J. and Kress, G. (2016) Multimodality, Learning and Communication: A Social Semiotic Frame, London and New York: Routledge. Blackledge, A. and Creese, A. (2017) ‘Translanguaging and the body’, International Journal of Multilingualism, 14(3): 250–268. https://doi.org/10.1080/14790718.2017.1315809 Blackledge, A. and Creese, A. (2020) Interpretations: An Ethnographic Drama, Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Blackledge, A., Creese, A. and Hu, R. (2017) ‘Everyday encounters in the marketplace: Translanguaging in the super-diverse city’, in A. De Fina, D. Ikizoglu and J. Wegner (eds.), Diversity and Super-Diversity: Sociocultural Linguistic Perspectives, Washington, DC: Georgetown University Law Center, pp. 97–116. Blommaert, J. (2001) ‘Investigating narrative inequality: African asylum seekers’ stories in Belgium’, Discourse & Society, 12(4): 413–449. Blommaert, J., Collins, J. and Slembrouck, S. (2005) ‘Polycentricity and interactional regimes in “global neighbourhoods”’, Ethnography, 6: 205–235. Blommaert, J. and Jie, D. (2010) Ethnographic Fieldwork: A Beginner’s Guide, Bristol: Multilingual Matters. 301

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Boas, F. (1940) Race, Language and Culture, New York: The Free Press. Charalambous, C., Charalambous, P. and Rampton, B. (2021) ‘International relations, sociolinguistics and the “everyday”: A linguistic ethnography of peace-building through language education’, Peacebuilding, 00(00): 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/21647259.2021.1895604 Codo, E. (2011) ‘Regimenting discourse, controlling bodies: Disinformation, evaluation and moral categorization in a state bureaucratic agency’, Discourse & Society, 22(6): 723–742. https://doi. org/10.1177/0957926511411696 Collins, J. and Slembrouck, S. (eds.) (2005) ‘Multilingualism and diasporic populations: Spatializing practices, institutional processes, and social hierarchies’, special issue of Language and Communication, 25(3): 189–334. Copland, F. and Creese, A. (2016) ‘Ethical issues in linguistic ethnography: Balancing the micro and the macro’, in P. DeCosta (ed.), Ethics in Applied Linguistics Research, Abingdon, UK: Routledge, pp. 161–178. Creese, A. (2005) Teacher Collaboration and Talk in Multilingual Classrooms, Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Creese, A. (2008) ‘Linguistic ethnography’, in K. A. King and N. H. Hornberger (eds.), Encyclopedia of Language and Education, 2nd ed., Vol. 10: Research Methods in Language and Education, New York: Springer, pp. 229–241. Creese, A., Bhatt, A., Bhojani, N. and Martin, P. (2008) ‘Fieldnotes in team ethnography: Researching complementary schools’, Qualitative Research, 8(2): 197–215. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468794107087481 Creese, A. and Blackledge, A. (2019) ‘Translanguaging and public service encounters: Language learning in the library’, The Modern Language Journal, 103(4): 800–814. https://doi.org/10.1111/modl.12601 Creese, A., Blackledge, A. and Hu, R. (2017) ‘Translanguaging and translation: The construction of social difference across city spaces’, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 50(May): 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1080/13670050.2017.1323445 Creese, A., Takhi, J. K. and Blackledge, A. (2016) ‘Reflexivity in team ethnography: Using researcher vignettes’, in M. Martin-Jones and D. Martin (eds.), Researching Multilingualism: Critical and Ethnographic Perspectives, Abingdon, UK: Routledge, pp. 203–214. De Maeijer, E., Van Hout, T., Weggeman, M. and Post, G. (2017) ‘Studying open innovation collaboration between the high-tech industry and science with linguistic ethnography: Battling over the status of knowledge in a setting of distrust’, Journal of Innovation Management, 4(4): 8–31. https://doi. org/10.24840/2183-0606_004.004_0003 Dewilde, J. and Creese, A. (2016) ‘Discursive shadowing in linguistic ethnography: Situated practices and circulating discourses in multilingual schools’, Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 47(3): 329–339. https://doi.org/10.1111/aeq.12158 Duranti, A. (2003) ‘Language as culture in US anthropology: Three paradigms’, Current Anthropology, 44: 323–347. Eckert, P. (2000) Linguistic Variation as Social Practice, Oxford: Blackwell. Emerson, R., Fretz, R. I. and Shaw, L. L. (2011) Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes, 2nd ed., Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Flynn, P., van Praet, E. and Jacobs, G. (2010) ‘Introduction: Emerging linguistic ethnographic perspectives on institutional discourses’, Text & Talk, 30(2): 97–103. Giampapa, F. (2011) ‘The politics of “being and becoming” a researcher: Identity, power, and negotiating the field’, Journal of Language, Identity & Education, 10(3): 132–144. https://doi.org/10.1080/1534 8458.2011.585304 Goffman, E. (1981) ‘Footing’, in Forms of talk, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Gregory, E., Lytra, V., Ilankuberan, A., Choudhury, H., and Woodham, M. (2012) ‘Translating faith: Field narratives as a means of dialogue in collaborative ethnographic research’, International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 11(3): 195–213. https://doi.org/10.1177/160940691201100302 Gumperz, J. J. (1982) Discourse Strategies, New York: Cambridge University Press. Gynne, A. (2019) ‘“English or Swedish please, no Dari!” – (trans)languaging and language policing in upper secondary school’s language introduction programme in Sweden’, Classroom Discourse, 10(3–4): 347–368. https://doi.org/10.1080/19463014.2019.1628791 Hammersley, M. (2007) ‘Reflections on linguistic ethnography’, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 11(5): 689–695. Heath, S. B. and Street, B. V. (2008) Ethnography: Approaches to Language and Literacy Research, New York: Teacher’s College Press and London: Routledge. 302

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Heinrichsmeier, R. (2020) Ageing Identities and Women’s Everyday Talk in a Hair Salon, London: Taylor & Francis. Heller, M. (1999) Linguistic Minorities and Modernity: A Sociolinguistic Ethnography, London: Longman. Heller, M. and Martin-Jones, M. (eds.) (2001) Voices of Authority: Education and Linguistic Difference, London: Ablex. Hymes, D. (1974) Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Jacquemet, M. (2011) ‘Crosstalk 2.0: Asylum and communicative breakdowns’, Text, 31(4): 475–497. Jaffe, A. (1999) Ideologies in Action: Language Politics on Corsica, Berlin: Mouton, Walter de Gruyter. Jaspers, J. (2005) ‘Linguistic sabotage in a context of monolingualism and standardization’, Language & Communication, 25(3): 279–297. Jaspers, J. and Rosiers, K. (2021) ‘Soft power: Teachers’ friendly implementation of a severe monolingual policy’, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development. https://doi.org/10.1080/01434632.2 019.1585864 Kamberelis, G. (2001) ‘Producing heteroglossic classroom (micro)cultures through hybrid discourse practice’, Linguistics and Education, 12(1): 85–125. Karrebæk, M. S. (2013) ‘“Don’t speak like that to her!”: Linguistic minority children’s socialization into an ideology of monolingualism’, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 17(3): 355–375. Karrebæk, M. S. (2014) ‘Rye bread and halal: Enregisterment of food practices in the primary classroom’, Language & Communication, 34(1): 17–34. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2013.08.002 Kell, C. (2015) ‘Ariadne’s thread: Literacy, scale and meaning making across time and space’, in C. Stroud and M. Prinsloo (eds.), Language, Literacy and Diversity: Moving Words, London and New York: Routledge. Krause, L. and Prinsloo, M. (2016) ‘Translanguaging in a township primary school: Policy and practice’, Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, 34(4): 347–357. https://doi:10.2989/16 073614.2016.1261039 Kress, G., Jewitt, C., Bourne, G., Franks, A., Jones, K. and Reid, E. (2004) English in Urban Classrooms: A Multimodal Perspective on Teaching and Learning, London: Routledge. Kress, G., Jewitt, C., Ogborn, J. and Tsatsarelis, T. (2001) Multimodal Teaching and Learning: The Rhetorics of the Science Classroom, London: Continuum. Kusters, A. and Hou, L. (2020) ‘Linguistic ethnography and sign language studies’, Sign Language Studies, 20(4): 561–571. https://doi.org/10.1353/SLS.2020.0018 Lefstein, A. (2008) ‘Changing classroom practice through the English National Literacy Strategy: A micro-interactional perspective’, American Educational Research Journal, 45(3): 701–737. https:// doi.org/10.3102/0002831208316256 Lefstein, A. and Israeli, M. (2015) ‘Applying linguistic ethnography to educational practice: Notes on the interaction of academic research and professional sensibilities’, in J. Snell S. Shaw and F. Copland (eds.), Linguistic Ethnography: Interdisciplinary Explorations, Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 187–206. Lefstein, A. and Snell, J. (2011) ‘Promises and problems of teaching with popular culture: A linguistic ethnographic analysis of discourse genre mixing in a literacy lesson’, Reading Research Quarterly, 46(1): 40–69. https://doi.org/10.1598/RRQ.46.1.3 Lillis, T. (2008) ‘Ethnography as method, methodology and “deep theorising”: Closing the gap between text and context in academic writing research’, Written Communication, 25(3): 353–388. Lillis, T., Leedham, M. and Twiner, A. (2020) ‘Time, the written record, and professional practice: The case of contemporary social work’, Written Communication 37(4). https://doi.org/10.1177/0741088320938804 Lillis, T. and Maybin, J. (eds.) (2017) ‘The dynamics of textual trajectories in professional and workplace practice’, Special issue of Text and Talk, 37(4). Lytra, V. (2007) Play Frames and Social Identities, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Madsen, L. M., Karrebæk, M. S. and Møller, J. S. (eds.) (2016) Everyday Languaging: Collaborative Research on the Language Use of Children and Youth, Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter. Maryns, K. (2005) ‘Monolingual language ideologies and code choice in the Belgian asylum procedure’, Language & Communication, 25(3): 299–314. Maryns, K. (2017) ‘The use of English as ad hoc institutional standard in the Belgian asylum interview’, Applied Linguistics, 38(5): 737–758. Maryns, K. and Jacobs, M. (2021) ‘Data constitution and engagement with the field of asylum and migration’, Journal of Pragmatics, 178: 146–158. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2021.03.008 303

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24 Posthumanism and applied linguistics Kelleen Toohey

Introduction It is old hat now to remark that modern theoretical physics uses metaphors that are consistent with First Nations’ cosmologies . . . [There are many] areas of academic discourse in which Native scholars recognize ‘new’ knowledge as being consistent with our ‘old’ ways. (Urion 1999: 15)

Métis scholar Urion pointed to what he saw as the then-commonplace recognition of the alignment of theory in several academic fields with Indigenous cosmologies. While this recognition may have been old hat to some in 1999, it is fairly recently that increasing numbers of commentators, especially those from settler societies that colonize(d) Indigenous peoples, ask, like Pennycook (2018: viii), ‘What if we started to think in terms of animals and their spirits, of the active role of land and objects in everyday life, in the idea of climate as commons?’ Or as Bennett (2010: 47) put it, ‘What would happen to our thinking about politics if we took more seriously the idea that technological and natural materialities were themselves actors alongside and within us?’ The growing scholarship that encourages such speculation has been labelled posthumanism, new materialism, speculative materialism, relational or quantum ontologies, or process philosophies, and it has many diverse emphases and interpreters in several disciplines (feminist poststructuralism, science and technology studies, anthropology, philosophy, and others), in addition to Indigenous scholarship.1 These perspectives offer relational, nonbinary, and non-hierarchical interpretations of humans, other species, languages, machines, other objects, and the natural and built environments, and interpretations that are very different from traditional understandings. If we are to understand the implications of these often unfamiliar and on-the-move views for applied linguistics, we must begin, in a sense, further back from where many applied linguistics discussions begin, to understand how posthumanism sees: ontologies, what we believe exists; epistemologies, what knowledge is and how knowledge is gained; ethics, how good action is determined; and language. This chapter begins with a description of how posthuman concepts have been variously articulated in feminism, philosophy, animal science, physics, and other fields, then describes how this constellation of ideas has been utilized recently by applied linguists and other scholars. Following this review, 306

DOI: 10.4324/9781003082637-27

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I briefly discuss some of posthumanism’s inquiry methods and examine what implications for practice the perspective might hold. I conclude with a brief discussion of future directions posthumanist inquiry in applied linguistics may take.

Posthumanism’s ethico-onto-epistemology: ‘existence is not an individual affair’ (Barad 2007: ix) The term posthumanism refers to speculation about what might come after the social, intellectual, political, and philosophical Western European project of humanism, which held that entities in the world were discrete, unrelated, unequal in value, and stable. Humanism also posited binary distinctions between humans and animals, ideas and their material manifestations, culture and nature, soul and body, reason and feeling (and men and women, humans and animals, brains and bodies, rationality and emotion, and so on). Zanotti (2020: 2) observed that Western thought2 has rested not only on Cartesian dualisms of mind and matter but also on Kant’s distinction between reason and nature and Newton’s physics, which ‘explains the world as consisting of entities with stable characteristics, standing in a relation of externality to one another’. Like Urion (ibid.), Métis scholar Todd (2016: 9) observed that the nature/culture split, often seen as universally shared, is actually a Western European knowledge tradition and does not describe the long history of scholarship and thinking of diverse Indigenous peoples.3 Some commentators on posthumanism recognize Indigenous peoples’ knowledge and scholarship, but most draw primarily on sources like the pre-Socratic monists, philosophers Spinoza and Nietzsche, contemporary science that makes ‘it impossible to understand matter in ways that were inspired by classical science’ (Coole and Frost 2010: 5), feminism, science and technology studies (notably actor-network theory), and contemporary poststructuralist theorists like Foucault (1979) and Deleuze and Guattari (2005 [1987]). Alaimo and Hekman (2008) argued that poststructural feminism urged the deconstruction of binaries, particularly the male/female dichotomy, because binaries inevitably lead to hierarchy. Posthumanists see the world composed of co-constituted and non-hierarchical entities that materialize in constant, indeterminate, and ever-changing relations with one another, and exceptionalism for humans is denied. People, animals, objects, nature, space and place, discourses, and so on are seen as unstable and indeterminate phenomena, proceeding (or performing) together in relation. Feminist physicist Barad (2007: 35) described early 20th-century quantum physics experiments that showed that ‘individual things with their own set of determinate properties’ could not be identified. Rather, individual things were always ‘entangled’ with other things and together, these entanglements acted in unpredictable and indeterminate ways. Barad used the term intraaction to refer to these entangled entities changing and becoming together. Posthumanism tells us that things are what they are in relation to other things, and they do not pre-exist (or post-exist) their intra-actions. While Barad used the quantum physics term ‘entanglement’, other scholars draw on the concept of ‘assemblage’, the English translation of the French term agencement, originally introduced by Deleuze and Guattari (ibid.) to reference much the same kind of relations. Dagenais et al. (2022: 252) explained, ‘humans and materials are seen as forming unpredictable and shifting assemblages constituted by a multiplicity of vital things . . . which together create phenomena under investigation’. Deleuze and Guattari’s (ibid.) concept of the rhizome has also been drawn upon by many to reference the complex relations that exist within and between assemblages. In botany, rhizomes are plants with multiple horizontal roots which put up multiple stems and spread in all directions. For Deleuze and Guattari, rhizomes refer to the multiple and unpredictable connections that are made between and among assemblages (Bangou et al. 2020). In contrast to Newtonian physics but as in 307

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rhizomatic relationships, entities do not have a priori independent (essential) characteristics, but they are entangled in, assembled with, and are not external to one another. And they are constantly changing or emerging. A relation that has interested many posthumanists is that of affect. Proposed by 17thcentury philosopher Spinoza, Boldt et al. (2015: 432) understood affect as ‘the registration on the body of being affected by something’ and emotion as ‘the meaning we [humans] attribute to affect’. Grosz (2008) gave as an example of affect the bodily sensations and intensities experienced while encountering art, before judgement, emotion or meanings are ascribed. Many posthumanists argue that humanist inquiry pays too little attention to affect, emotion, and other bodily experience but that affect is experienced by all bodies (not only human) in assemblages. Leander and Ehret (2019) explained that affect theory is concerned with the intensities produced and with what emerges when heterogenous elements intra-act. Attention to affect and emotion, they argued, permits a wider and perhaps messier view of how bodies, discourse, and other material are assembled in their field of concern, literacy. Posthumanists reject assumptions of human exceptionalism (over animals, for example). Animal scientist Fraser (2009) claimed that affect and emotion had been ignored in animal studies because positivism deemed that which was not ‘objective’ was not scientific, and together these justified inattention to the subjective experience of animals. He and others argued that contemporary interest in animal welfare and animal rights, and in the contextual, relational, and to what we might term the intra-action of human observers with animals enable not only affect and emotion to be part of such inquiry, but also the relevance of the question, what is a good life for animals? (Tennessen and Caldwell 2020). While Western scientific practice required the observer to be rational, disinterested, and detached from that which or those whom she observed, posthumanism emphasizes that knowledge-making entails affect and emotion occurring in all bodies in assemblages. Feminism early resisted patriarchal, racist, and classist claims that because of their biological makeup (their bodies), certain kinds of humans are able, and others unable, to engage in various kinds of activities; instead, feminists urged investigation of the historical, cultural, and discursive formations that limited the participation of women and others in social life. More recently, feminist posthuman scholars like Grosz (ibid.: 24) suggested the timeliness of rendering our conceptions of social, cultural, political, and sexual life [to be] more complex, more open to questions of materiality and biological organization, more nuanced in terms of understanding both the internal and external constraints on behavior as well as the impetus to new and creative activities. Interdisciplinary studies of embodiment (including studies of [dis]abilities, continuums of health or illness, sexualities, neurodiversities, cultural practices, and so on) and their impacts on quotidian life and thinking show the intra-actions among biological, discursive, material, and other entities. Youdell et al.’s (2018) bio-social investigation, for example, captured and analyzed physiological markers of high levels of stress (volatile organic compounds in exhaled breath) when students underwent testing in classrooms. They recommended further interdisciplinary investigation of how affect ‘flows between bodies and across school sites, [and] produces particular teacher, learner and abject bodies’ (225). Related to affect and embodiment, desire is another important concept for posthumanists: for Deleuze and Guattari (ibid.), desire is a force of life (or a flow) that entities experience in intra-action, a force that involves transformation, enhancement, and expansion. Desire is a leaning toward, a joining with, an attraction to doing more, being more. Braidotti (2011: 154) 308

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explained, ‘Desire is the propelling and compelling force that is driven by self-affirmation . . . not to preserve but to change.’ Mozère (2007: 298) urged attention to the ‘language of desire of young children’, which may not be verbal. All these concepts are important in understanding posthuman ontologies and posthuman epistemologies. The humanist world of independent stable entities discoverable by rational and disembodied observers using standardized quantification measures and/or universalistic taxonomies was critiqued by poststructuralists as ‘the view from nowhere’ (Nagel 1986). Poststructuralists argued that knowledge was always situated and specific, and they recommended genealogies of knowledge and concepts to understand their provenance and power (e.g. Foucault 1979). Adding to these poststructural insights, posthumanists have argued that knowers are ‘already part of the substances, systems, and becomings of the world’ (Alaimo 2014: 14) and that knowers, knowledge, and knowledge-making practices are always entangled with previous and still-to-come discourses, human and non-human bodies, observation instruments, taxonomies, place, and so on.4 From this perspective, neither being nor knowledge can be fixed, determinate, universal, or independent of time, space, the embodied observer, or observation instruments. Rather, from this perspective, knowing is relational, intra-actional and entangled with matter. Barad (ibid.: 185) used the term ‘onto-epistemologies’ to stress that ‘[p]ractices of knowing and being are not isolable; they are mutually implicated. We don’t obtain knowledge by standing outside the world; we know because we are part of the world’. For posthumanists, knowledge is sensitive to all the intra-actions in which it is created and used. Knowing is not a matter of individuals internalizing (putting into their brains) representations of a world outside themselves. Rather, knowing is materially entangled with the human, the non-human, objects, discourses, what is taken to exist, and so on and is never finished. Seeing everything in non-hierarchical, dynamic, and intra-acting relations has implications for action and for ethics. Posthumanism, especially in its iteration as feminist new materialism, is particularly interested in the ethical repercussions of what is taken to matter in any given context. Western dualist politics posit that humans are privileged over animals and other living and non-living things, and some humans are privileged over others (they matter more). Flattening hierarchies, as posthumanism urges, means recognition of the entanglements of all entities in phenomena and ‘questioning what is being made to matter and how that mattering affects what it is possible to do and to think’ (Davies 2016: 83). Barad (ibid.: 393) saw ethics as ‘responsibility and accountability for the lively relationalities of becoming of which we are a part’. This openness to others and to change is also evident in the work of Haraway (2016: 178), who explicitly rejected ethical relativism: ‘Cultivating responseability . . . requires the risk of being for some worlds rather than others and helping to compose those worlds with others.’ Like Bennett (ibid.), who argued that recognizing the importance of the material world required a new politics, Taylor (2016: 15) centred interdependence ‘by including nonhumans in an ethics of care, by understanding the human always and only in-relation-to nonhumans who are no longer “others” but are, intimately and always, ourselves as the body multiple’. Indigenous scholar TallBear (2015: 234) reminded us that these are not new ideas in Indigenous cosmologies: [I]ndigenous peoples have never forgotten that nonhumans are agential beings engaged in social relations that profoundly shape human lives . . . for many Indigenous peoples, their nonhuman others may not be understood in even critical Western frameworks as living. ‘Objects’ and ‘forces’ such as stones, thunder, or stars are known within our ontologies to be sentient and knowing persons (this is where new materialism intersects with animal studies). 309

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Posthuman perspectives on language A historical and influential binary in applied linguistics is that between languages as idealized systems of rules and languages as actually (often imperfectly) used in real-life settings, with the former seen as the proper object of linguistic investigation. Sociolinguists in the 1960s and 1970s urged attention to language usage, noting that speakers and writers were influenced by social and cultural conventions, in addition to linguistic rules (e.g. Hymes 1962). Later, multimodal theorists argued for attention to the multiple modes and media of human communication (e.g. Kress and van Leeuwen 2001), to humans’ employment of a wide range of semiotic resources in addition to the linguistic (e.g. gesture, image, bodily comportment, items in the environment, the environment itself, and so on). Posthuman scholars de Freitas and Curinga (2015: 250) pointed out that language is not only words, their orders, and their meanings but also as an assemblage of multiple features – human bodies and their vocal musculature and intensity – ‘the tone, the rhythm, the variation of emphasis, the loudness, the changes of pitch . . . that make the human song possible’. Others have stressed the assembled materiality of language but also point to its immaterial, ideational, and representational qualities (Grosz 2017; MacLure 2013). Many posthumanists (and others) prefer the gerund languaging to indicate the processual, becoming, emergent, and assembled nature of communication. Applied linguists García and Li (2014: 8), for example, argued, ‘The term languaging is needed to refer to the simultaneous process of continuous becomings of ourselves and of our language practices, as we interact and make meaning in the world.’ With a disposition to breach traditional ontological and epistemological boundaries, posthumanists thus see communicative behaviour unfolding in processes with many non-human entities and, like them, dynamically differentiating over space and time. Posthumanists are developing a sense of language not existing outside of or before its entanglements (with dress, other living species, non-living things, affect, emotion, space, time, other language events, and raced, gendered, and sexed human bodies, among others). A posthuman perspective on language might draw from Ingold’s (2018: 24) notion of agency: ‘not given in advance of action, as cause to effect, but is rather ever forming and transforming from within the action itself”. Ingold suggested using the gerund ‘agencing’, and we might similarly think about languaging as forming and transforming within its specific entanglements, acting in indeterminate ways, and always emerging anew. Such a view presents real challenges to traditional and even contemporary understandings of language as repertoires of resources, existing before and apart from users. The implications of this view have yet to be fully explored. While this introduction to various posthuman conceptions of ontologies, epistemologies, ethics, and language was seen as necessary because these perspectives are different from traditional Western views, what such a view might offer applied linguistics and related fields can possibly best be illustrated through an examination of some of the lively inquiry that puts these perspectives to work. We turn now to a description of these rapidly multiplying studies.

Current contributions and inquiry The Annual Review of Applied Linguistics (n.d.) includes the following key topics in our field: ‘language learning and pedagogy, second language acquisition, sociolinguistics, language policy and planning, language assessment and research design and methodology’ (cambridge.org/ core/journals/annual-review-of-applied-linguistics/information). Posthuman concepts illuminate matters in all these areas and are drawn upon as well by scholars who do not identify as applied linguists but whose work in language and literacy education parallels some of applied 310

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linguistics’ major interests. This scholarship is currently very energetic, and space constraints make it impossible here to review more than a subset of this literature or to convey the richness of its analyses. Early childhood educators in Sweden have been thinking with and developing posthumanist concepts for some time (Lenz Taguchi 2010, 2013; Olsson 2009, 2020). Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s (ibid.) concepts of continuous becoming and emergence, Olsson (2009: 183) described events in preschools in which children were ‘permitted to work within the construction of sense and problems’ and in which teachers and researchers attempted to listen (interpreted broadly) to children in order to follow them in their desiring for examining problems and learning. Teachers engaged in pedagogical documentation (MacDonald 2007): gathering classroom photographs, writing field notes, audio- and videotaping, and doing other means of documentation, not to document ‘what really took place’ but rather to try to understand children’s desires, their affects, and their interests in and experimentation in the problems that engaged them. On the basis of those documentations, teachers and researchers then experimented with ways of arranging the learning environment to provoke children’s further learning (making different apparatuses, materials, and persons available). With teachers in three Swedish preschools in an interdisciplinary project involving neuroscientists performing brain scans and other individual child testing, researchers Aronsson and Lenz Taguchi (2017) described teachers’ initial resistance because of their training in collectivist, non-normative early childhood education practices. Refusing customary distinctions between neuroscience and education, the authors argued that teacher consideration of neuroscience literature, along with their pedagogical documentations and the researcher’s ethnographic fieldnotes, served to rearrange these adults’ learning environments and unsettled their understandings of children and learning and to lead them to new questions and new problems. The work of American researcher Kuby and teacher Gutshall Rucker (2016) has many resonances with the Swedish research. In Gutshall Rucker’s elementary school classrooms, they documented children’s responses to the open-ended invitation ‘Go be a writer!’ and the provision of a wide range of what is customarily seen as ‘art’ materials. Children eventually produced puppet shows, dramatic sets, scripts, poems, murals, stories, games, and sometimes, nothing at all. Kuby and Gutshall Rucker created the concept of literacy desiring to describe ‘the rhizomatic and intra-active processes of children-creating-with-materials-and-one-another, not always in intentional ways with materials, modes, time, space, language and bodies’ (15). In a later publication (Kuby and Gutshall Rucker 2020: 30), they noted the alphabetic skills-based approach to literacy has been detrimental to so many children, and they quoted Truman’s (2019: 2) observation that ‘literacy in its multiplicities still operates hierarchically such that some kinds of literacies – reading, numeracy, speaking in a dominant language – matter more, and are considered superior to others’. Gutshall Rucker and Kuby (2020: 29) asked, ‘What are the ethics and consequences to the world when we tell children what counts as literacy or writing (and what does not)?’ (29). Toohey (2018) worked with posthumanist concepts to reconsider sociocultural ethnographic research she had previously conducted in classrooms with children of various language backgrounds learning English at school over three years (Toohey 2000). In the later publication, she argued that posthuman perspectives challenged humanist methodologies of the ‘set-apart’ researcher and also enabled new understandings of the consequences of certain children coming to be seen as more or less able in language and other learning than others. She considered how socio-material concepts of embodiment, affect, and intra-action showed how subordination of some child learners of English was produced and what consequences these hierarchies produced. 311

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Editors Hackett et al. (2020: 5) claimed in a special issue of the Journal of Early Childhood Literacy that definitions of literacy that privilege rationality and hierarchies of intelligence and aptitude for learning ‘end up producing intense divisions and social inequalities’. This issue’s articles used posthuman concepts to investigate how geopolitical realities, race, capitalism, neoliberalism, educational assessments, children’s bodies, and other issues are evident in literacy assemblages and how thinking differently about language and literacy education might ‘provide an adequate account of, or critical position against, the positioning, pathologizings and inequalities families and young children live out in their daily lives’ (10). Some posthumanists, notably Latin American education scholars, see close relations between posthumanist and decolonial views. Sousa and Pessoa (2019: 530), for example, argued colonial understandings of living, thinking and being endure as ‘racial, class, sexual, gender, linguistic, spiritual and epistemic hierarchies, which characterize our Eurocentrist world-system’. Veronelli (2015) pointed out that white European colonizers justified their domination of non-white colonized people, extraction of their resources, and institution of capitalist economies by constructing the colonized as cognitively, morally, and linguistically inferior, with their languages being incapable of communicating more than rudimentary meanings. Connecting these ideas about coloniality (the lingering effects of colonization) to posthuman critiques of human exceptionalism (and some humans being more exceptional than others) and to ideas about relationality, materiality, ethics, and entanglements, Sousa and Pessoa argued that a decolonial and posthumanist perspective can help us to consider more than the human in educational assemblages and develop ‘new ways of thinking and becoming that may help us in the process of delinking from exclusionary narratives posed by humanism and coloniality’ (ibid.: 531) Considering how it is that we can start to think and act with ideas delinked from colonialism and humanism, Pennycook (2016: 446) presented data from online and face-to-face encounters and showed how location(s), non-human materials, multiple languages, texts, popular culture, and so on were all part of communicative events. He argued that recognition of the distributed, located, and emergent nature of language practices allows us to ‘consider the subject in more material terms, as part of a wider distribution of semiotic and material resources, as interpellated by objects, as no longer the guarantor of meaning, as a product rather than a precursor of specific interactions’ (2016: 457). In Pennycook (2018: 140), he further explored these themes and concluded that ‘both a modified materialism from political economy and a modified new materialism [can] make the case for a new way of thinking about our ethical responsibility to each other and the world’. Ethical responsibilities to other humans, other species, and the world have been taken up in various ways by posthumanist applied linguists. Some, interested in the environmental effects of humanism, specifically critique the ideology of humans being uniquely intelligent, language-using, and rational. Applied linguist Sealey (2019: 306) showed the anthropocentrism of discourse about animal communication (seen as rudimentary and incapable of abstraction), arguing that this approach ‘may limit not only our means of representing the myriad sensory experiences of other species but also the potential for understanding [of] and empathy’ for those species. Appleby (2019: 86) examined multiple discourses (in art, movies, popular media, and so on) about sharks analyzing how they reinforce normative heterosexuality and hegemonic masculinity, arguing that ‘applied linguists have a role in interrogating the deleterious ways in which language and other semiotic resources define and shape relationships between human and non-human species’ (8). Bucholtz and Hall (2016) considered how humans and animals build caring intersubjective relations through embodied and skilful joint interactional 312

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accomplishments, foregrounding how bodies and affect become vital media through which to bridge human and nonhuman modes of communication. Leander and Ehret (2019: 3) were also centrally interested in affect, writing that ‘attending to the felt intensities of literacy learning and teaching . . . provides openings that may reorient us to what could be, what should be and to shifting relations and mangled movements up close and far away’. Their edited book presents diverse authors’ attempts to imagine affective pedagogies that might amplify possibilities for social justice and how writing affectively might become transformative for authors and readers. Lenters (2019), for example, a child whose affective draw to animals (and cute puppy videos) enabled her to express a position on a pertinent and critical ethical question not taken up by her other group members. In an earlier publication, Ehret et al. (2016) examined assemblages of bodies-materials-place in a school in which youth were making digital videos of books. The authors showed how boundaries between media-based and book-based videomaking ideas and affect were constructed in assemblages in which the spaces in which the students worked and their movement (e.g. from a classroom to a playground) had important effects on their learning. Many posthumanist scholars stress the importance of space and place in assemblages. While previous scholarship does acknowledge space and environments, this literature typically has been interested in coming to universalistic environment-neutral understandings of language and language use. Applied linguist Canagarajah (2017: 33) proposed examining space, materiality, and environments as active, generative, and agentive, and he argued that a spatial orientation ‘appreciates the ecological interconnection of all things and beings’. Kell (2015: 426) analyzed two examples of how ‘meaning making is not just carried across time and space through spoken language, but is mediated across space and time through various types of textartefacts and material objects’. Applied linguist O’Halloran (2020) described an assignment in a higher-education class that asked students to choose texts taking opposite positions on some matter of concern; these texts then were interpreted through digital corpus analysis, resulting in students’ critical and novel interpretations of these texts. Arguing that agency in human-digital-tool intra-actions is indeterminate and distributed, he argued for a rhizomatic or posthuman pedagogy that ‘stresses the importance of students undergoing personal learning adventures that experiment with novel connection-making and, in turn, lead to unpredictable turns, to positive difference and creativity, to fresh and unusual perspectives’ (851).

Methods for posthuman inquiry The studies summarized thus far show that many posthuman applied linguistic inquiries use various qualitative methodologies5 to collect their data6 and often ethnographic methods, such as participant observation, interviews, document collection (including digital content), focus groups, and so on. Some researchers have described the discomfort they have experienced trying to maintain detachment, objectivity, and neutrality recommended by humanist approaches in their fieldwork with particular groups of people (often disadvantaged people) or, in some cases, children and teachers (Astuti 2017; Toohey 2021). Educational sociologist St. Pierre (2019: 12) proposed post-qualitative inquiry, arguing that posthuman understandings require new concepts and new ways of thinking, beginning with consideration of a ‘concrete encounter with the real, not with a research question’. She recommended that, rather than focus on research methods, inquirers might better study those concepts (often provided by philosophers) that provoke new ways of thinking, and finally, finding creative and experimental means to report the inquiry in ways that invite new thinking and 313

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new action. Lenz Taguchi (2017: 702) similarly discussed how methods emerge ‘as we grapple with various problems or matters of concern, to live, create, and invent in an experimental play of ongoing differentiation’. For her, as for many other posthumanists, method should be ‘doubled’: while the researcher documents (with concepts) aspects of the matter(s) of concern, she simultaneously should ‘actively engag[e] in reconfiguring those conditions and thus the concept itself’. Springgay and Truman (2017) described their multiple ‘walking projects’ (www.walkinglab.org) as creative experiments with imagining and creating different worlds. Guided by posthuman ontologies, epistemologies, and ethics, posthuman inquiry entails active engagement with problems and issues researchers (and their human and non-human relations) encounter. Such engagement may include careful intervention, experimentation, and importantly, thinking with theory. Engagement very significantly involves ethics, and as Barad (ibid.: x) put it, acknowledgement, recognition [and] . . . the ongoing practice of being open and alive to each meeting, each intra-action, so that we might use our ability to respond, our responsibility to help awaken, breathe life into ever new possibilities for living justly. The projects described earlier illustrate a variety of posthuman inquiry methods. Kuby and Gutshall Rucker (2016) engaged in joint (researcher and teacher) participation in observing, documenting, and asking children questions about their intra-actions in the classroom; the researchers also experimented with presenting transcriptions using different fonts for marking different kinds of rhetorical contributions. They also presented their representations of children’s activities and products in a variety of genres (e.g. using a board game format for describing a child’s construction of a board game). Davies (2014) described narratively her impressions of children’s intra-actions in a preschool in which teachers engaged in pedagogical documentation and consulted (initially unfamiliar) literature on social psychology to design pedagogical interventions. It is unlikely that the variety of methods posthumanists researchers pursue will ‘congeal’ into a set of approved practices, but rather, they will continue to rely on the ingenuity and creativity of researchers and the problems/issues/questions that stimulate them, aligning with new ontologies, epistemologies, and ethics.

Implications for theory/practice Posthumanism stresses the singularity of intra-actions, making it impossible to articulate ‘best’, ‘universal’, ‘successful’ practices in applied linguistics. The studies reviewed here report on projects authors conducted in particular situations, locales, and assemblages. Their applicability to other assemblages is uncertain. St. Pierre (2019) recommended that novice post-qualitative researchers study philosophy, perhaps implying changes to the grounding in linguistics of many applied linguistics programs. Interdisciplinary studies have also intrigued posthuman researchers, as have studies of posthuman ethics. As Barad (2008: 144) put it, ‘particular possibilities exist at every moment, and these changing possibilities entail a responsibility to intervene in the world’s becoming, to contest and rework what matters and what is excluded from mattering’.

Future directions How Indigenous cosmologies of relation and how understandings of decolonialization might speak to posthumanist applied linguistics are important open questions for our field. Together, 314

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Indigenous and posthuman thinking may provide effective challenges to the boundaries and binaries that have led to systematic racism and myriad other inequities minority language speakers and racialized others experience, as well as speciesism, environmental destruction, and the climate crisis. Posthuman concepts and interdisciplinary practices also provide challenges to foundational concepts in our field, including language, languaging, repertoires, agency, and agencing. Conceptualizing an assembled, activity-oriented, creative, and processual notion of how it is that we and others ‘language’ will be important future work for posthumanist applied linguists. A posthumanist applied linguistics might understand language as not primarily given in advance of action but as ideational, forming, and transforming in the multiple intra-actions in which it assembles with other matter in the world.

Related topics languaging; literacy; linguistic repertoires; language and materiality

Notes 1 I here refer to these perspectives as posthumanism, although I have elsewhere referred to new materialisms (Toohey 2018, 2019). Ferrando (2013: 26) defined posthumanism as an umbrella term for recent onto-epistemologies, including new materialism as ‘a feminist development’ within the posthumanist frame. 2 While ‘Western thought’ does not describe the ways all Westerners think, the dualism of Western humanism is widespread and a foundation of the cultural movement that conceptualized humans as rational, autonomous, and agentive (and often, male) (Braidotti 2013). 3 Like ‘Western thought’, ‘Indigenous ways of thinking’ is an ahistorical generalization that elides diversities among Indigenous peoples’ ways of thinking, knowing, and acting; however, some commentators argue that commonalities among Indigenous views are based on their common experiences of colonization. Still others have argued, like Tewa educator Cajete (2017), that while Indigenous people globally are very diverse, they share deep connections to their home places. 4 Barad (2007) credited the early-20th-century realization in physics that instruments of observation (apparatuses) for knowledge-creation were entangled with (and, in effect, created) that which was being observed, as a paradigmatic illustration of a knowing that is different from Cartesian understandings: with one apparatus, for example, light behaves like (is produced as) a particle, but with another apparatus, light behaves like (is produced as) a wave. 5 Posthumanists challenge the binary quantitative/qualitative. They are interested in transdisciplinary perspectives and in imagining and experimenting with a range of perhaps completely new inquiry methods. 6 Ingold (2014: 383) argued that to think of what we learn in fieldwork as data is to adopt humanist perspectives: ‘To convert what we owe to the world into “data” that we have extracted from it is to expunge knowing from being. It is to stipulate that knowledge is to be reconstructed from the outside, as an edifice built up “after the fact’” rather as inhering in skills of perception and capacities of judgment that develop in the course of direct, practical and sensuous engagements with our surroundings.’

Further reading Bangou, F., Waterhouse, M. and Fleming, D. (eds.) (2020) Deterritorializing Language, Teaching, Learning and Research: Deleuzo-Guattarian Perspectives on Second Language Education, Leiden: Brill Sense. (This edited book brings together 11 chapters explicitly concerned with showing how several Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts have relevance and importance for research on classroom language teaching, international postgraduate teacher education, second language writing, and second language teacher education.) Coole, D. and Frost, D. (eds.) (2010) New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency and Politics, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. (This edited book is foundational in understanding the feminist roots of new 315

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materialism. In 13 chapters, authors discuss materiality, politics, and how new materialism articulates with historical materialism.) Davies, B. (2014) Listening to Children: Being and Becoming, London: Routledge. (In this accessible single-authored book, the author describes her encounters with children in various settings, interpreting those encounters through posthuman concepts, showing how she engaged in co-experimentation with teachers and children.) Toohey, K., Smythe, S., Dagenais, D. and Forte, M. (eds.) (2020) Transforming Language and Literacy Education: New Materialism, Posthumanism and Ontoethics, New York: Routledge. (This edited book contains 11 chapters which combine explication of posthumanist concepts with accounts of pedagogy with various ages of students [from young children to prospective and practising teachers] and various foci [e.g. literacy, affect, place inquiry, instructional coaching, filmmaking, and stopmotion photography].) Tuhiwai Smith, L., Tuck, E., Yang, K. W. (eds.) (2019) Indigenous and Decolonizing Studies in Education: Indigenous and Decolonizing Research Methodologies, New York: Routledge. (This book presents 15 Indigenous and decolonizing studies, which ‘highlight the role of Indigenous cosmologies, axiologies, and epistemologies in the design and implementation of research’ (xi). Relationality with other humans, animals, the land and water, and so on characterize all these studies, which present a variety of research methodologies, activities, and perspectives.)

References Alaimo, S. (2014) ‘Thinking as the stuff of the world’, O-Zone: A Journal of Object-Oriented Studies, 1: 13–21. Alaimo, S. and Hekman, S. (eds.) (2008) Material Feminisms, Bloomington: Indiana University. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics (n.d.) https://cambridge.org/core/journals/annual-review-ofapplied-linguistics/information/about-this-journal (accessed 5 March 2021). Appleby, R. (2019) Sexing the Animal in a Posthumanist World: A Critical Feminist Approach, New York: Routledge. Aronsson, L. and Lenz Taguchi, H. (2017) ‘Mapping a collaborative cartography of the encounters between the neurosciences and early childhood education practices’, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 37(5): 242–257. DOI: 10.1080/01596306.2017.1396732 Astuti, R. (2017) ‘On keeping up the tension between fieldwork and ethnography’, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 7(1): 9–14. DOI: 10.14318/hau7.1.003 Bangou, F., Waterhouse, M. and Fleming, D. (eds.) (2020) Deterritorializing Language, Teaching, Learning, and Research: Deleuzo-Guattarian Perspectives on Second Language Education, Leiden: Brill Sense. Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Durham: Duke University Press. Barad, K. (2008) ‘Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter’, in S. Alaimo and S. Hekman (eds.), Material Feminisms, Bloomington: Indiana University, pp. 120–154. Bennett, J. (2010) Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Boldt, G., Lewis, C. and Leander, K. (2015) ‘Moving, feeling, desiring, teaching’, Research in the Teaching of English, 49(4): 430–441. www.jstor.org/stable/24398714 Braidotti, R. (2011) Nomadic Subjects, New York: Columbia University Press. Braidotti, R. (2013) The Posthuman, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Bucholtz, M. and Hall, K. (2016) ‘Embodied sociolinguistics’, in N. Coupland (ed.), Sociolinguistics: Theoretical Debates, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 173–197. Cajete, G. (2017) ‘Children, myth and storytelling: An Indigenous perspective’, Global Studies of Childhood, 7(2): 113–130. DOI: 10.1177/2043610617703832 Canagarajah, S. (2017) ‘Introduction: The nexus of migration and language: The emergence of a disciplinary space’, in S. Canagarajah (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Migration and Language, London: Taylor and Francis Inc., pp. 1–28. DOI: 10.4324/9781315754512 Coole, D. and Frost, S. (eds.) (2010) New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Dagenais, D., Brisson, G., Forte, M. and André, G. (2022). ‘Questioning human and material boundaries in plurilingual identity construction’, in E. Piccardo, A. Germaine-Rutherford and G. Lawrence (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Plurilingual Language Education, New York: Routledge, pp. 249–262. 316

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MacDonald, M. (2007) ‘Toward formative assessment: The use of pedagogical documentation in early elementary classrooms’, Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 22(2): 232–242. DOI: 10.1016/j. ecresq.2006.12.001 MacLure, M. (2013) ‘Researching without representation? Language and materiality in post-qualitative methodology’, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26(6): 658–667. DOI: 10.1080/09518398.2013.788755 Mozère, L. (2007) ‘In early childhood: What’s language about?’, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 39(3): 291–299. DOI: 10.1111/j.1469–5812.2007.00327.x Nagel, T. (1986) The View from Nowhere, Oxford: Oxford University Press. O’Halloran, K. (2020) ‘A posthumanist pedagogy using digital text analysis to enhance critical thinking in higher education’, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 35(4): 845–880. DOI: 10.1093/llc/ fqz060 Olsson, L. M. (2009) Movement and Experimentation in Young Children’s Learning: Deleuze and Guattari in Early Childhood Education, London: Routledge. Olsson, L. M. (2020) ‘Lekta and literacy in early childhood education: Entwinements of idealism and materialism’, in K. Toohey, S. Smythe, D. Dagenais and M. Forte (eds.), Transforming Language and Literacy Education: New Materialism, Posthumanism and Ontoethics, New York: Routledge, pp. 72–90. Pennycook, A. (2016) ‘Posthumanist applied linguistics’, Applied Linguistics, 39(4): 445–461. DOI: 10.1093/applin/amw016 Pennycook, A. (2018) Posthumanist Applied Linguistics, London: Routledge. Sealey, A. (2019) ‘Translation: A biosemiotics/more-than-human perspective’, Target: International Journal of Translation Studies, 31(3): 305–327. DOI: 10.1075/target/18099.sea Sousa, L. P. Q and Pessoa, R. R. (2019) ‘Human, nonhuman others, matter and language: A discussion from posthumanist and decolonial perspectives’, Trabalhos em Linguística Aplicada, 58(2): 520–543. DOI: 10.1590/010318135373715822019 (English version) Springgay, S. and Truman, S. (2017) ‘On the need for methods beyond proceduralism: Speculative middles, (in) tensions, and response-ability in research’, Qualitative Inquiry, 24(3): 203–214. DOI: 10.1177/1077800417704464 St. Pierre, E. (2019) ‘Post qualitative inquiry in an ontology of immanence’, Qualitative Inquiry 25(1): 3–16. DOI: 10.1177/107780041877634 TallBear, K. (2015) ‘Theorizing queer inhumanisms: An Indigenous reflection on working beyond the human/not human’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 21(2–3): 230–235. DOI: 10.1215/10642684–2843323 Taylor, C. (2016) ‘Edu-crafting a cacophonous ecology: Posthumanist research practices for education’, in C. A. Taylor and C. Hughes (eds.), Posthuman Research Practices in Education, New York: Palgrave MacMillan, pp. 5–24. Tennessen, T. and Caldwell, C. D. (2020) ‘Animal welfare: A good life for animals’, in C. D. Caldwell and S. Wang (eds.), Introduction to Agroecology, Singapore: Science Press and Springer Nature, pp. 169– 181. DOI: 10.1007/978-981-15-8836-5_12 Todd, Z. (2016) ‘An indigenous feminist’s take on the ontological turn: “Ontology” is just another word for colonialism’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 29(1): 4–22. DOI: 10.1111/johs.12124 Toohey, K. (2000) Learning English at School: Identity, Social Relations and Classroom Practice, Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. Toohey, K. (2018) Learning English at School: Identity, Socio-Material Relations and Classroom Practice, Revised 2nd ed., Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters. Toohey, K. (2019) ‘The onto-epistemologies of new materialism: Implications for language, identity and pedagogy’, Applied Linguistics, 40(6): 937–956. DOI: 10.1093/applin/amy046 Toohey, K. (2021) ‘Observant participation and representation in new materialist research’, in C. Porter and R. Griffo (eds.), The Matter of Practice: New Literacies and New Materialism in Linguistically Diverse Classrooms, Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, pp. 31–48. Truman, S. (2019) ‘Inhuman literacies and affective refusals: Thinking with Sylvia Wynter and secondary school English’, Curriculum Inquiry, 49(1): 110–128. DOI: 10.1080/03626784.2018.1549465 Urion, C. (1999) ‘Changing academic discourse about native education: Using two pairs of eyes’, Canadian Journal of Native Education, 23(1): 6–15. Veronelli, G. (2015) ‘The coloniality of language: Race, expressivity, power, and the darker side of modernity’, Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women’s and Gender Studies, 13(Summer): 108–135. 318

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Youdell, D., Harwood, V. and Lindley, M. (2018) ‘Biological sciences, social sciences and the language of stress’, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 39(2): 219–241. DOI: 10.1080/01596306.2018.1394420 Zanotti, L. (2020) ‘De-colonizing the political ontology of Kantian ethics: A quantum perspective’, Journal of International Political Theory: 1–20. Online first. DOI: 10.1177/1755088220946777

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25 Social semiotics and multimodality Theo van Leeuwen

Multimodality The term ‘multimodality’ dates from the 1920s. It was a technical term in the then relatively new field of the psychology of perception, denoting the effect different sensory perceptions have on each other. An example of this is the so-called McGurk effect: if people are shown a video of someone articulating a particular syllable, such as /ga/, while hearing another syllable, such as /ba/, they perceive neither /ga/ nor /ba/ but /da/ (Stork 1997: 239). In other words, perception is multimodal. It integrates information received by different senses. More recently, linguists and discourse analysts have taken up the term, broadening it to denote the integrated use of different modes, such as facial expression and gesture in speech, and image, layout and typography in writing. As soon as they had begun to study texts and communicative events, rather than isolated sentences, they realized what they should have known all along: that communication is multimodal, that spoken language cannot be adequately understood without taking non-verbal communication into account, and that many forms of contemporary written language cannot be adequately understood unless we look, not just at language but also at images, layout, typography, and colour. In the last 30 or so years, this led to the development of multimodality as a field of study investigating the common and the distinct properties of the different modes in the multimodal mix and the way they integrate in multimodal texts and communicative events. It is not difficult to see why such a field of study should have developed. From the 1920s onwards, public communication has become increasingly multimodal. The sound film changed speech, enlarging subtle aspects of non-verbal communication and so influencing how people talk and move and smile the world over. Later, television made non-verbal communication a decisive factor in politics, most famously in the televised debate between Nixon and Kennedy. Writing, too, had become multimodal, as illustrations and layout elements, such as boxes and sidebars, broke up and reshaped first the printed page and, later, the web page. Most recently social media have enabled the use of multimodality in private communication. Like scholars in other fields of study, linguists took notice. In the course of the 20th century, several schools of linguistics engaged with communicative modes other than language. The first was the Prague School, which, in the 1930s and 1940s, extended linguistics to the visual 320

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arts and the non-verbal aspects of theatre and which included studies of folklore and collaborations with avant-garde artists (see, for example, Matejka and Titunik 1976). The structuralist semiotics of the 1960s also used concepts and methods from linguistics to understand communicative modes other than language. Largely inspired by the work of Roland Barthes, it mostly focused on analyses of popular culture and the mass media rather than on folklore and avant-garde art (e.g. Barthes 1967, 1977, 1983). In roughly the same period, American linguists began to take an interest in the multimodal analysis of spoken language and non-verbal communication in everyday interaction. Birdwhistell (e.g. 1973) developed an intricate set of tools for analyzing body motion; Hall (1964, 1966) introduced his highly multimodal theory of proxemics, the study of the distance people keep from each other in social interaction; and Pittenger et al. (1960) published a detailed and ground-breaking multimodal analysis of the first five minutes of a psychiatric interview. In the late 1960s, conversation analysis replaced the 16 mm sound camera with the cassette recorder as the research tool of choice, which diminished attention to non-verbal communication. More recently, however, scholars in this tradition have rediscovered multimodality (Ochs 1979; Goodwin 2001; Mondada 2018), and mediated discourse analysis, inspired by the work of Ron and Suzie Scollon (2003, 2004), linked micro-analysis of social interaction to the wider social and political context and added a new emphasis on technological mediation (e.g. Jones 2014). A fourth school emerged in the 1990s. Inspired by M. A. K. Halliday’s social semiotic approach to linguistics (Halliday 1978), it was this school which adopted and broadened the term ‘multimodality’ and introduced it into applied linguistics, especially into the study of language and literacy in education. Today, multimodality has its own biannual conference, textbooks (e.g. Jewitt et al. 2016; Ledin and Machin 2020), and edited books (e.g. O’Halloran 2004; Jewitt 2014) and is regularly included in handbooks and encyclopaedias of linguistics, discourse analysis, visual communication, and so on. Although it encompasses a number of distinct theoretical and methodological approaches, it has nevertheless remained a united field of study, with productive dialogue and mutual influence between different schools.

Social semiotics Based on the linguistics of Halliday (1978), social semiotics differs in a number of ways from its predecessor, structuralist semiotics, which was based on the linguistics of Saussure (1975 [1916]). As Hodge and Kress wrote in the introduction of their pioneering book Social Semiotics (Hodge and Kress 1988: 1–2), ‘Mainstream semiotics’ emphasizes structures and codes at the expense of functions and social uses of semiotic systems. . . . It stresses systems and codes rather than speakers and writers or other participants in semiotic activity as connected and interacting in a variety of ways in concrete social contexts. It attributes power to meaning instead of meaning to power. It dissolves boundaries within the field of semiotics, but tacitly accepts an impenetrable wall cutting off semiotics from society and from social and political thought. It is this wall social semiotics seeks to penetrate and for that reason it does not trace its origins to Saussure, but to Malinowski (1923, 1935), who introduced two concepts that would become crucial in social semiotics: ‘context of situation’ and ‘context of culture’. Malinowski saw language as inextricably intertwined with situational contexts, with practical activities such as fishing or gardening as well as with narrative and ritual practices, and he broadened his 321

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definition of language to include ‘not only spoken words, but also facial expression, gesture, bodily activities, the whole group of people present during an exchange of utterances, and the environment in which these people are engaged’ (1935: 22), recommending the use of sound film, then a new medium, to study ‘fully contextualized utterances’. Social semiotics therefore foregrounds practices rather than structures. While many linguists and semioticians have described language as a kind of ‘object’ with different layers (strata). Kress and Van Leeuwen (2001), inspired by Goffman (1981), focus not on language but on embodied and material practices of speech and writing, describing these as combining a range of activities such as designing, producing, disseminating, recording, and so on, which may be performed simultaneously by a single person or sequentially and organized as a division of labour between different participants. Particularly influential is Malinowski’s emphasis on recontextualization. In his appendix to Ogden and Richards’ The Meaning of Meaning (Malinowski 1923), he described how fishing, as practiced by the Trobriand islanders whose culture he studied, was recontextualized in stories about fishing, enacted in the different context of storytelling, which introduced a different purpose, ‘justifying the social order’ and ‘regulating conduct in relation to hunger, sex, economic values’ (1935: 7). These stories, in turn, were recontextualized in what he called ‘the language of ritual and magic’, verbal acts which ‘exercise a powerful influence on social organizing’ (1935: 9), perhaps not entirely unlike today’s vision and mission statements. Equally important, finally, is Malinowski’s concept of ‘context of culture’, ‘the whole cultural history behind the kind of practices [people] are engaging in, determining their significance for the culture, whether practical or ritual’, as Halliday summarized it (Halliday and Hasan 1985: 6). To study the context of culture, social semiotics must connect with social theory and with social, cultural, and political history – that is, with resources that can explain why semiotic practices and products are the way they are. In Saussure, society had remained an ‘inscrutably powerful collective being’ (Hodge and Kress 1988: 22). And though Peirce had emphasized the process of semiosis and did have a dialogic conception of language, he presented this as ‘a fact of personal psychology, without explicit roots in the social process’ (Hodge and Kress 1988: 20). Social semiotics chose a different path. Nevertheless, it also retained much that was valuable in the theoretical concepts and analytical practices of earlier semiotics, especially its emphasis on developing ‘ways of semiotically describing and explaining the processes and structures through which meaning is constituted’ (Hodge and Kress 1988: 2). One other fundamental aspect of social semiotics was its adoption of Halliday’s metafunctional theory (Halliday 1978). For Halliday, different kinds of meaning co-exist in mutually informing layers that function in different ways. Halliday refers to them as the interpersonal, ideational, and textual metafunctions. Respectively, they enact social relations, construe human experience and enable communication, and they do so by drawing on different and distinct linguistic resources – resources for interpersonal meaning-making, for instance, include forms of address (e.g. personal pronouns), speech acts (e.g. mood choices such as declarative interrogative and imperative), and more. This approach was subsequently applied to other semiotic modes, for instance, to visual communication (Kress and Van Leeuwen 2021) and the built environment (Ravelli and McMurtrie 2016). The social semiotic approach to analyzing multimodal communication analysis has two key concerns: investigating the similarities and differences between different semiotic modes and media and studying how different semiotic modes and media integrate into multimodal texts and communicative events. Both require attention to the semiotic resources and their communicative potential, as well as to the way these resources are taken up in concrete settings. In the next section, I will deal with the first of these two concerns. 322

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The social semiotic analysis of modes and media A key question for linguists turning to the study of non-linguistic modes of communication is the question of whether or to which degree non-linguistic modes are like language and to which degree they can be studied with the concepts and methods of linguistic analysis. Christian Metz (1974a, 1974b), investigating the language of cinema, came to a negative conclusion: cinema does not have equivalents to the key units of language – to phonemes, words, clauses, and so on. In Reading Images, Kress and Van Leeuwen (2021) came to a different conclusion. They agreed that the forms of visual communication are radically different from those of language. But this does not mean that text and image cannot fulfil the same communicative functions and, at some level, express the same meanings. They, therefore, combined functional concepts and methods from the linguistics of Halliday (1978, 1985) with formal concepts and methods from the art theory of Arnheim (1969, 1974, 1982) and others, assuming that visual communication, like language, can realize Halliday’s metafunctions and that the ‘grammar of visual communication’, like language, can be described as a set of systems of functional-semantic choices. To take a relatively simple example, both language and image can realize social distance, but they do so in different ways. In language, social distance can be realized through degrees in formality of style and mode of address, or through pronoun systems, as in languages with formal and informal second person pronouns. In images, social distance is realized by ‘size of frame’ – the close shot, showing only head and shoulders realizing close distance; the long shot, showing people at full length, realizing far social distance; and the medium shot something in between. Figure 25.1 represents this as a Hallidayan system network. This clearly relates closely to the way Edward Hall (e.g. 1966) described the distance we keep from each other in everyday interaction. Normally, only people with whom we have a personal relationship may come close enough to allow easy touching, while we ‘keep our distance’ from others, for instance, but just where each ‘zone’ begins and ends will differ from culture to culture. In other words, cultures have semantic systems of social distance that function as resources for enacting interpersonal relations, but these systems can be expressed in different modes – through language, through proxemic behaviour, through images, and so on. Kress and van Leeuwen (2021) presented a range of system networks, detailing the ideational, interpersonal, and textual meanings images can realize. Their account of visual ideation broke with earlier traditions which recognized only the symbolic and connotative meanings of the people, places, and things in images as semiotic, but interpreted the compositions that combine them aesthetically rather than semiotically. Kress and Van Leeuwen argued that, just as linguistic grammar connects nominal groups and verbal groups into clauses, so visual grammar can connect the ‘volumes’ that realize grammatical participants and the ‘vectors’ that realize grammatical processes (the terms come from Arnheim 1982) into larger compositional syntagms that function like clauses.

Social Distance

Intimated/personal

Close Shot

Social

Medium Shot

Impersonal

Long Shot

Social Distance (System Network)

Figure 25.1 The system of social distance 323

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For Kress and Van Leeuwen visual syntagms can combine together or be embedded into each other in a number of different ways. O’Toole (2010 [1994]), on the other hand, analyzed images in terms of clearly defined ranks analogous to the ranks of linguistic analysis (word, word group, clause, clause complex) – the rank of the ‘work’ as a whole, the rank of the ‘episode’ (defined as a configuration of ‘figures’ involved in a common action or situation), the rank of the ‘figures’, and the rank of ‘parts of the figures’. At each rank, specific systems realize the different metafunctions. The figure, for instance, will ideationally have specific attributes, interpersonally a certain degree of prominence, and textually certain stylistic features. O’Toole’s theory has been further elaborated and tested by Boeriis and Holsanova (2012). Grammars of other semiotic modes followed the pioneering work of Kress and Van Leeuwen and O’Toole – grammars of gesture and movement (Martinec 2000, 2001), of music (Van Leeuwen 1999), and of the built environment (Ravelli and McMurtrie 2016). Tseng (2013) developed a systematic account of cohesion in film, inspired by the work of Halliday and Hasan (1976) and Martin (1992). As will be discussed further here, these grammars have been used as analytical frameworks in a range of contexts, including education, critical discourse analysis, and the analysis of everyday interaction and digital media. Kress and Van Leeuwen (2001) then distinguished between modes and media. They saw modes as relatively abstract for the expression of ideational, interpersonal, and textual meanings that are not tied to a particular means of expression. Language, for instance, can be materialized as speech or as writing, and as discussed earlier, the system of social distance can be realized linguistically, proxemically, and visually. Media are the concrete material substances or physical actions in and through which modes can be realized. To put it another way, modes are resources for designing semiotic artefacts or events (e.g. composing a piece of music or writing a play); media are resources for materializing them (e.g. performing the music or the play). In doing so, they create the styles that express individual and group identities, including, for instance, corporate branding. Media make meaning not through systems but on the basis of provenance and experiential metaphor. In the case of provenance, signifiers are imported from one context (for instance, a historical period, a social group, or a culture) into another, in order to signify ideas and values associated with that other context in the context that does the importing. Literary styles, for instance, can import archaic expressions, foreign words, and dialects into the ‘standard language’  (Mukařovský  1964:  338–339)  to  evoke  ideas  and  values  ‘standardly’  associated  with  the periods, countries, and regions these expressions come from. Provenance, therefore, rests on contextually specific cultural knowledges. The idea was inspired by Roland Barthes’ analysis of the role of ‘connotation’ and ‘myth’ in popular culture (Barthes 1977). Experiential metaphors transfer our experience of concrete material qualities to more abstract ideas relating to these qualities. The idea derives from Lakoff and Johnson (1980), who argued that the understanding (and we might add, the creation) of metaphors is based on concrete experience: ‘No metaphor can ever be comprehended or even adequately represented independently of its experiential basis.’Take the example of speech, the materiality of language itself. We all know what happens when our voice tenses – it becomes higher, sharper, and brighter. And we also know in what kind of circumstances our voice becomes tense – when we feel threatened, for instance, or when we have to restrain strong emotions, whether anxiety or excitement, to mention just some of the possibilities. This range of experiences therefore creates a meaning potential. It can come to mean a range of things – anxiety, repression, fear, excitement, and so on – and how that potential will be actualized and narrowed down depends on the context – the specific situational context as well as the broader cultural context. The same approach can be applied to analyzing material objects rather than bodily performances. 324

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The social semiotic analysis of experiential metaphor takes its cues not from grammar but from phonology. Making meaning with materiality combines, first of all, a set of parameters, such as melody and rhythm and timbre, welding them into a multimodal unity, and secondly, a set of what Kress and Van Leeuwen, following Jakobson and Halle (1956), called the distinctive features of these parameters – voice quality, for instance, combines tension and pitch and loudness and roughness (and more, as can be seen in Figure 25.2). These distinctive features are simultaneous choices. They are always all at play. And they are also gradable, ‘more or less’ choices rather than binary choices, scales which run, for instance, from maximally tense to maximally lax – in Figure 25.2, the curly bracket represents simultaneity and the double arrow gradation. Describing and analyzing semiotic modes and media separately, as many social semioticians have done, is useful but does not begin to show what happens when they are put together and integrated in multimodal texts and communicative events. This will be done in the next section.

The social semiotic analysis of multimodal integration Early studies of multimodal integration mostly focused on the relation between text and image. In the 1960s, Roland Barthes distinguished between three types of image-text relation (Barthes 1977). In the first two, illustration and anchorage, image and text convey essentially the same content, though of course in different ways. In the case of illustration, the text is primary,

Figure 25.2 The parametric system of voice quality 325

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and the image interprets it in a particular context and for a particular audience; in the case of anchorage, the image is primary and the text narrows down its meaning to suit a particular context. In the Middle Ages, Barthes said, illustration had been the dominant text-image relation. The most highly valued images illustrated the key stories and key concepts of the time – stories from the Bible and ancient mythology, as well as theological concepts. Anchorage began to take over in the Renaissance when science and exploration encouraged images that could document the world, so making it amenable to scientific labelling, classification, and interpretation. In the case of relay, Barthes’ third category, text and image do not ‘say the same thing’ but convey different, complementary content. In the dialogue scenes of films and comic strips, for instance, the image shows the speakers the text of what they say. Text and image, therefore, depend on each other to convey the whole of the content, a relation which is, today, becoming increasingly significant, such as in the way people use emojis in text messaging. Martinec and Salway (2005) have provided the most detailed Barthes-inspired account of the semantics of text-image relations, focusing both on the relative status of text and image and on their logico-semantic interrelations. When image and text are equal in status, they said, the whole of the image connects to the whole of the text. An image may, for instance, show a group of people walking to a courthouse while the text says, ‘Janklow walks up to the courthouse with his legal team.’ If a newspaper article about the actions of a politician is illustrated by a photograph of that politician, then that image is ‘subordinate’, relating only to part of the text. Martinec and Salway’s account of the logico-semantic relationships between text and image was based on Halliday’s theory of conjunction (1985). They first of all distinguished different types of elaboration, instances where the text ‘rephrases’ the image in some way, or vice versa. In the case of exposition, image and text are at the same level of generality, while in the case of exemplification, either the text is more general than the image or the image more general than the text (as, for instance, in a skull-and-crossbones icon accompanied by the words ‘high voltage’). Extensions add new, related information, as when the captions in art books add details, such as the name of the artist, the year in which the work was created, and so on. Enhancements add circumstantial elements to the image or vice versa – for instance, the location or timing of an event, or its reason or result. Projection, finally, is the relation between the image of a speaker and his or her words (this may also include the relation between a thinker and his or her thoughts, as indicated by the thought bubbles of comic strips). Martin and Salway’s approach took its cues from the linguistics of conjunction and complex clause construction. But text-image relations can also be approached from the visual end, using theories of visual composition. Kress and van Leeuwen (2021) have suggested that the spatial zones of pictures, pages, and screens (left and right; top and bottom; centre and margins) interrelate textual elements, regardless of whether they are visual or textual, by providing them with specific ‘information values’. To start with left and right, if there is polarization (some kind of difference or contrast) between an element placed on the left and an element placed on the right, then the left element will be understood as the Given, as a departure point for the message that is, or is assumed to be, already familiar to the reader or viewer, while the right element is understood as the New, the element that contains the information the message is trying to get across. This left-right information flow clearly corresponds to the left-right mode of writing and reading in Western culture and is indeed reversed in cultures that write from right to left. When there is vertical polarization, polarization between an element placed in the upper and an element placed in the lower section of the picture, page, or screen, the top element is the Ideal, the idealized or generalized essence of the message, and the bottom element the Real, contrasting with the Ideal in presenting, for instance, factual details, documentary evidence, or practical consequences. In single-page magazine advertisements, the Ideal typically depicts 326

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the ‘promise’ of the product or the glamour, success, or sensual satisfaction it will bring to the consumer, while the Real shows the product itself and perhaps provides factual information about it. The Centre, finally, is another key compositional zone. Instead of polarizing the elements of the composition, the Centre unifies them, providing the Margins that surround it with a common meaning or purpose. In a Rank Xerox company brochure, for instance, the Centre presented a happy Rank Xerox employee, while the words that surrounded him suggested the various ways in which Xerox makes its employees happy by ‘recognizing and rewarding’ their efforts. Such compositional schemas are multimodal for two reasons. They can apply to any kind of spatial configuration, whatever its mode – image, text, museum display, stage design, architectural façade – and they can integrate different kinds of element (e.g. text and image) into a multimodal whole. But it is a different kind of integration from that described by Martinec and Salway. The connections it establishes between elements are visual rather than verbal, simultaneous rather than linear, informational rather than semantic, and geared towards hierarchies of importance and attention rather than to internal, logical coherence. Verbal integration and visual integration have their own logics and their own epistemological commitments. In accounting for time-based, linear multimodal integration, inspiration came from theories of intonation and rhythm, foregrounding, again, hierarchies of information and attention rather than logico-semantic relations. Rhythm provides cohesion, bundling speech, action, and music together and segmenting the resulting multimodal whole into the communicative moves that propel it forward. It is also, and at the same time, the physical substratum, the sine qua non, of all human action. Everything people do has to be rhythmical and in interacting people synchronize with each other as finely as musical instruments in an orchestra. Analyzing multimodality in films brings out how it is now the rhythm of speech, and now the rhythm of action, and now the rhythm of music, which provides, as it were, the melody, and with which the signs of other semiotic modes are rhythmically aligned. Figure 25.3 analyzes a short excerpt from Hitchcock’s North by Northwest in which the rhythm is carried by the dialogue. The rhythmic accents that provide the ‘beat’ are in italics. The rhythmic phrases are enclosed in brackets and the nuclear accents, the key moments of each phrase, are capitalized and italicized. Double brackets enclose larger rhythmic units which are also, and at the same time, larger narrative moves. Note the increase in tempo and tension at the start of the second of these units, where Eve says, ‘Wait a minute.’ Elements other than speech – the edits of the film, the gestures of Thornhill and Eve – find their place within the temporal order of the speech rhythm. The edits (indicated by a vertical line across all the rows) coincide with stressed syllables, the gestures with the boundaries between rhythmic phrases. Even when there is no speech, towards the end of the excerpt, the timing if the edits still follows the rhythm initiated by the preceding speech. Everything is rhythmically ordered. Rhythm not only integrates the different modes. It also frames and delineates the communicative moves of the unfolding text, here the moves of the narrative. The excerpt in Figure 25.3 immediately precedes the famous scene in which Thornhill (Cary Grant) is attacked by a cropduster plane. Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint) has just told Thornhill when and where to meet a mysterious man called Kaplan. What Eve knows, and what Thornhill does not know, is that the meeting is a trap and that Thornhill will be attacked. After some perfunctory lines of dialogue, during which the audience is left to wonder whether Eve will warn him, there is a change of pace. Tension rises. At the last minute, Eve seems to have second thoughts. ‘Wait a minute,’ she says. ‘Please.’ A tense silence follows. But the moment passes, and Thornhill leaves to board his train. 327

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Figure 25.3 Rhythmic analysis of an excerpt from North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock 1959)

The remainder of this chapter reviews some applications of the social semiotic approach to multimodal analysis.

Educational applications The social semiotic approach to multimodal analysis has been most widely applied to education. To a large extent this was initiated by the New London Group, which, among others, included Gunther Kress, James Gee, Allan Luke, and Mary Kalantzis (New London Group 1996). This led to three kinds of studies: studies of the development of multimodal literacy 328

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in young children; studies of multimodal learning resources, including textbooks, toys, and digital resources; and studies of multimodal classroom interaction. Gunther Kress’ Before Writing (1997) initiated an influential approach to studying the early development of multimodal literacy, investigating how very young children use the affordances of whatever materials they have at hand or whatever techniques they have mastered on the basis of interest, of what is of crucial importance to them at a given moment. In one of his key examples, a three-year-old child draws a car as a series of circles (wheels). Having mastered the drawing of circles, the child now uses circles as a means of expressing what, to him, is a crucial characteristic of cars. As a semiotic resource the circle has many possible meanings, but the one this child selects, at this particular moment, is motivated by his interest in thinking about cars. Thus, learning to draw and learning to understand the world around him go hand in hand. But as Kress also says, the social will soon make its impact (Kress 1997: 13): As children are drawn into culture, ‘what is to hand’ becomes more and more that which the culture values and therefore makes readily available. The child’s active, transformative practice remains, but is more and more applied to materials which are already culturally formed. This approach has inspired studies of ‘situated literacies’ (Anderson 2013), based on observing young children in the process of making meaning with multimodal resources (cf. Hackett 2014), most recently, though still relatively rarely, with digital resources (e.g. Gilje 2011; Burn 2016). Other applications focus on analyzing texts produced by children, rather than on the process of  producing  them  (e.g.  Ormerod  and  Ivanič  2002),  or  on  analyzing  textbooks,  which  have  become increasingly multimodal over the years (Kress and Bezemer 2009), and other learning resources. Sometimes this led to the development of explicit pedagogies for promoting multimodal literacy (cf. Mills and Unsworth 2017), at other times it foregrounded children’s agency. Jewitt’s study of the way children use computer games to learn science (Jewitt 2006) combined these two approaches, describing the games and showing how children struggle to match the rules of the game with their everyday experience of the phenomena the game recontextualizes. When learning to understand ‘bouncing’ through a game called Playground, for instance, they could choose a particular kind of bounce (represented by icons of a spring, a ball, etc.) and attach it to an object, such as a bullet, which could then bounce off bars. But this is confusing. Isn’t ‘bouncing’ a quality of the bars rather than the bullets? Nevertheless, the game did allow children to explore the rules of mechanics systematically, interactively, and multimodally and practically without any verbal input. Studies of classroom interaction, finally, have moved from the traditional emphasis on linguistic exchange structures to strong contextualization and detailed attendance to non-verbal communication and spatial settings. Kress et al. (2005), for instance, described the layout of classrooms as realizing different pedagogies, such as a transmission pedagogy, with individual tables lined up in rows or a ‘participatory/authoritarian’ pedagogy, with tables put together to create teams of four or five students facing each other (‘participatory’) yet angled in a way that allows the teacher total visual control from the front of the classroom (‘authoritarian’). To mention some recent examples, Lim (2020) studied multimodal classroom interaction, Ravelli (e.g. 2018) the role of spatial arrangements in changing practices of teaching and learning in universities, and Diamantopoulou et al. (2012) museums as spaces for learning. In all this work, multimodality is seen as a key towards better learning, including empowering students from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, such as in South Africa (Archer 2014), with different modes and media enabling the representation of different aspects 329

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of and perspectives on objects of learning. Kress (2010: 16–17) provides a telling example from the teaching of science. Representing a cell linguistically requires naming its elements and establishing logical relations between them, such as possessive relations (‘The cell has a nucleus’). Representing a cell visually requires deciding just where the nucleus should be positioned within the cell. More generally, different modes ask for different ‘epistemological commitments’, and for this reason, it is important to understand their affordances and potentials for learning.

Multimodality and critical discourse analysis Critical discourse analysis has generally focused on verbal texts, such as political speeches and newspaper reports and editorials, though interest in multimodal critical discourse analysis has grown in recent years, with special journal issues and edited books (e.g. Machin 2013; Djonov and Zhao 2014; Machin and Van Leeuwen 2016) showing that many of the issues on which critical discourse analysts have focused, such as racist discourse and the discourses of global corporations and far-right populist politicians, have also been analyzed from a multimodal point of view. Van Leeuwen (2000) used his framework for analyzing the visual representation of social actors to investigate visual racism in a corpus of images representing Africans and Afro-Americans in European popular culture, including postcards, tourist brochures, advertisements, and so on. This brought out, among other things, that demeaning racial stereotypes continue to be used and that Africans and Afro-Americans continue to be depicted as agentive in subservient and deviant actions. He concluded (ibid.: 335), Visually communicated racism can be much more easily denied, much more easily dismissed as ‘in the eye of the beholder’ than verbal racism . . . It is for this reason that consideration of images should have pride of place in any enquiry into racist discourse. Chouliaraki (e.g. 2006) developed a framework for the multimodal analysis of television news with the explicit aim of integrating multimodal analysis with the critical analysis of television news discourses. She applied this framework to the reporting of ‘distant suffering’, comparing the reporting of a boat accident in a remote area of India in which 44 people died with the reporting of 9/11, and showing how the victims of the boat accident were ‘othered’ in ways which the victims of 9/11 were not. To give some examples of the multimodal critical analysis of corporate discourses, Machin (2004) has analyzed how the Internet image bank Getty Creative Images allows images to be searched for abstract concepts rather than for concrete people, places, things, actions and events. Such conceptual images are produced to fit into multimodal designs, using restricted colour palettes that will easily harmonize with page layout and leave space for words, and they are generic rather than specific, using a range of decontextualizing devices and a restricted vocabulary of attributes to indicate the identity of people and places (e.g. hard hat and rolledup blueprint means ‘architect’, laptop means ‘office’, nondescript skyscraper means ‘city’). Most importantly, from a critical point of view, the concepts included predominantly stress the positive values of contemporary corporate discourse: freedom, creativity, innovation, determination, concentration, spirituality, well-being, and so on. Roderick has applied a social semiotic approach to the analysis of ‘framing’ in contemporary office design, showing how ‘the affordances of spatial layout and material form produce rather than merely reflect neoliberal ideologies of work’ (Roderick 2016: 275) – ideologies, such as flexibilization, deregulation, and obligation of workers to self-manage. 330

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Multimodal analysis of political discourse has been less common, though Wodak and Forchtner have analyzed the use of political cartoons in the election campaign of Austria’s farright Freedom Party (Wodak and Forchtner 2014), the representation of the political process in the TV series West Wing (Wodak and Forchtner 2018), and the appearance and performance of far-right politicians such as H. C. Strache (Wodak 2021), while Djonov and van Leeuwen (2014) have analyzed the ‘marketization’ of political discourse and Machin and Suleiman (2006) the political content of two computer war games set in the Middle East, one produced by the American company Novalogic, which works closely with the US Department of Defense, and one by Hezbollah. The critical multimodal analysis of the speech and non-verbal communication of politicians, however, remains underdeveloped, despite Norman Fairclough’s early call for its importance (Fairclough 2000: 4): Communicative style is a matter of language in the broadest sense – certainly verbal language (words), but also all other aspects of the complex bodily performance that constitute political style (gestures, facial expressions, how people hold themselves and move, dress and hairstyle, and so forth). A successful leader’s communicative style is not simply what makes him attractive to voters in a general way, it conveys certain values which can powerfully enhance the political message.

Multimodality and the analysis of everyday interaction Ron and Suzie Scollon (e.g. 2003, 2004) integrated social semiotics in their ‘mediated discourse analysis’ approach to the multimodal analysis of everyday situated interactions. Many of their studies started from simple everyday actions such as having a cup of coffee (Scollon 2001) and then made a physical object (e.g. a paper coffee cup and the printed messages on it) into the centre of a set of converging lines of inquiry-interaction analysis, down to the microlevel of conversational and non-verbal rhythms, semiotic analysis of the setting of the interaction, and critical analysis of the broader social, cultural, and political environment. Building on their work, Sigrid Norris (2005) analyzed one of her ethnographic interviews in this vein, including in her analysis not just the interview itself but also the activity in which the interviewee was engaged while talking to her (ironing clothes), the soap opera that was running on television in the background, the game played by her daughter on the floor of the room, and at a larger scale, the interviewee’s life story and the discourses she invoked to represent it – discourses about women as professionals and housewives, about mothering, about the power relations between men and women, and so on. The results of the analysis then led to theoretical reflections on issues of social theory, such as agency, identity, and habitus. Norris makes the complexities of analyses of this kind visible by means of detailed techniques of transcription (cf. also Norris 2002), including elements of traditional conversation analysis and photographs with superimposed dialogue, complete with intonation transcription, and relevant television or computer screen images that would otherwise be invisible.

Multimodality and the analysis of digital media Social semiotic approaches to the study of multimodality in digital media have been of two kinds: studies of people’s use of digital media, often with special emphasis on the expression and negotiation of individual or shared identities, and studies of digital media as semiotic resources, investigating what kinds of meanings can be multimodally expressed on different platforms and how. 331

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Multimodal studies of the online expression of identity have often focused on the expression of identity (e.g. Bouvier 2012; Zappavigna 2016; Adami 2018). In a study of Instagram images posted by mothers of young children, Zappavigna (2016) has explored the use of filters and the visual expression of subjectivity, distinguishing between images that actually portray the photographer (selfies), images that infer the photographer by showing part of her body (e.g. the hand that holds the camera), and images that imply the photographer (e.g. by means of a foreground object). Adami (2018) has analyzed a WordPress web blog titled The Diary of a Frugal Family, which started as a personal blog sharing ‘the memories that we make as a family’ but gradually became more like a business as the blogger’s tips on saving money and food preparation found its followers, and elements such as ‘privacy policy’ and ‘why you should work with me’ were added to the site. In the process, the blogger’s use of multimodal semiotic resources (the colour palette, the fonts, the layout, the images, etc.) changed from being ‘amateurish’ but also ‘joyous, chaotic, and authentic’ to being ‘professional, clean, and minimalist’, blending the personal and the corporate. Social semiotic studies of digital semiotic resources started by focusing on resources for producing texts, such as PowerPoint and Word. Djonov and Van Leeuwen (e.g. 2011, 2013) explored how PowerPoint structures the use of colour, background texture, layout, and so on and the way people have used the medium in educational and commercial presentations. Kvåle (2016) researched the history of Microsoft SmartArt, which began as an Office feature for charting organizational reporting structures (‘insert organizational chart’), then broadened into a resource for creating ‘relationship diagrams’ and finally became SmartArt, now used in a wide range of practices, including education, but still based on the principles of organizational charts and diagrams. She shows how linguistics students attempted to use SmartArt to create ‘morphological trees’, a kind of diagram which SmartArt does not provide for, and concluded (ibid.: 269): When students choose to represent their knowledge of language as SmartArt hierarchies, they are in fact constructing their knowledge in the guise of organization charts. Ideologies from organization management are thereby infused into higher education in general and language studies in particular – not explicitly by verbal instruction, but by being buried in the templatized formats for multimodal representation as part of the technologization of discourse. At present this approach is beginning to be applied, not only to text-producing software such as PowerPoint and Word but also to social media, as in Zappavigna’s work on hashtags as tools for categorizing information and creating communities of like-minded Internet users (Zappavigna 2018) and in the computer programs that regulate other kinds of social practices, such as online shopping (Höllerer et al. 2019).

Future developments Multimodal analysis is a relatively new enterprise. There is much room for further development of the approaches discussed in this chapter and for new applications. It is nevertheless possible to list a few desirables for the future development of multimodality as a branch of applied linguistics. I will focus on three: the need for self-reflexivity, the need for attending to cultural diversity, and the need for engaging with technology. To start with self-reflexivity, as my examples have shown, multimodality is a multidisciplinary field. It needs to draw on different disciplines – for instance, in the case of the visual 332

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mode, on functional linguistics and on art and design theory. To do justice to the crucial role of context in making meaning, it needs ethnographic research or other forms of documenting contexts. And to be able to not just describe but also explain multimodal practices, it needs to attend to the broader cultural and historical context of the phenomena it investigates. As interest in multimodality grows in other disciplines, such as in organization and management studies (cf. Höllerer et al. 2019), mutual learning processes need to make explicit just what different disciplines can learn from each other and contribute to each other’s work. As for the need to focus on cultural diversity, to date multimodality has predominantly looked at Western modes and media and Western ways of using them. But just as linguistics has been immensely enriched by the study of languages which express radically different meaning systems in radically different ways, multimodality would also be much enriched by engaging with cultural diversity, such as by mining the rich resources of anthropological literature, but also, and above all, by decolonizing the discipline and linking up with researchers across the globe. Finally, there is a need to engage with technology. In the past, technology has often been treated as a means for recording and/or distributing communicative artefacts and events which does not affect them semiotically. However, today’s multimodal technologies come with powerful built-in semiotic constraints and affordances that deeply influence what can be said with them and how, and they have been instrumental in the development of new forms of speaking (Zhao et al. 2014) and writing (Kress 2003; Van Leeuwen 2020) in many of the domains that concern applied linguists. With so much work to be done and so much still to learn, multimodality is certain to play an increasingly important role in helping to build the applied linguistics of the future and enabling it to face the task ahead.

Related topics critical discourse analysis; discourse analysis; linguistic ethnography; media; systemic-functional linguistics

Further reading Jewitt, C. (ed.) (2014) The Routledge Handbook of Multimodality, 2nd ed., London: Routledge. (This is a representative and up-to-date collection of approaches to and applications of multimodal analysis.) Jewitt, C., Bezemer, J. and O’Halloran, K. (2016) Introducing Multimodality, London: Routledge. (This book brings together a range of approaches to multimodal analysis and has detail on the design and conduct of multimodal research.) Kress, G. (2010) Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication, London: Routledge. (This book brings together Kress’ influential work on the development of multimodal literacy in young children, multimodality in education, and the social semiotics that underlies his work.) Kress, G. and Van Leeuwen, T. (2021) Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design, 3rd ed., London: Routledge. (This is an extensive and widely used social semiotic account of the ‘language’ of visual communication.) Van Leeuwen, T. (2005) Introducing Social Semiotics, London: Routledge. (The third part of this book deals extensively with the ways in which different semiotic modes can be integrated into multimodal texts.)

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26 Linguistic landscapes Robert Blackwood and Will Amos

Introduction Linguistic landscapes, or LLs, are established phenomena of interest across an increasing number of linguistic fields and disciplines. LL studies explore meaning in all kinds of public spaces, whether they be metropolises, trains, buses, ferry terminals or airports, shops, restaurants and tourist sites, live events, protests and pride marches, museums, galleries, and religious institutions, human bodies and clothing, or online spaces. LL studies are primarily about interpreting meaning through visibility (and sometimes invisibility), and therefore, they represent something of a departure from traditional (socio)linguistic areas of enquiry, which historically have privileged spoken language as the object of study. As we explain further here, the LL is also at the vanguard of the critical deconstruction of ‘language’ itself, as it provides a set of tools for analyzing systems of meaning and interpretation that are both non-verbal and non-textual. It could be argued that LL research has its deepest foundations in the study of multilingualism, especially in terms of understanding the relationship between languages as attested in the public spaces of towns and cities. As we outline in this chapter, the field has evolved considerably over the past 15 years or so, both methodologically and thematically. These developments can be mapped through discussions about the characteristics of signs and how to define and categorize them, to debates about broader forms of meaning and interpretation and their materialization through diverse semiotic resources and stimuli, not all of which fit the mould of ‘language’ in the traditional sense. After a brief sketching of important foundational research, we outline contemporary areas, methods, and issues of interest before making some recommendations for practice, discussing potential future directions of the field, and noting some related topics.

Historical perspectives Compared with some of the more established sociolinguistic disciplines, LL research represents a relatively fledgling field. Its main period of growth has come in the last 15 years, in part correlating with the rise of scholarly interest in globalization and linguistic pluralism, themselves a product of the wider recognition that very few (if any) parts of the world can DOI: 10.4324/9781003082637-29

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nowadays be described as monolingual. Due to the growth of emerging markets, the mass internationalization of global economies, and the pervasion of brands, products, and services across borders, languages are spreading, evolving, and coming into contact at an exponential rate. Research associated with the LL, in turn, has historically formed part of the scholarly mission to understand this evolutionary step of multilingualism, as well as the many and varied forms of language contact that it creates. Landry and Bourhis (1997) use the term ‘linguistic landscape’ in a study of English-French multilingualism in a series of Canadian schools. In their article, they refer to the LL as ‘the visibility and salience of languages on public and commercial signs’ (p. 23) and proceed with a description which has become the most cited piece of literature in the LL canon (p. 25): The language of public road signs, advertising billboards, street names, place names, commercial shop signs, and public signs on government buildings combines to form the linguistic landscape of a given territory, region, or urban agglomeration. Despite numerous early studies crediting the field’s origin to this article, a number of detailed literature reviews – particularly those by Backhaus (2007) and Gorter (2013) – point out that interest in signs dates back at least to the 1970s. Our overview cannot be comprehensive in such a short space, but a number of pioneering studies are worth highlighting in order to trace the foundational development of the field. The first, by Rosenbaum et al. (1977), relates to a 1973 survey of 50 names of shops, restaurants, and offices on a commercial street in central Jerusalem. Part of a larger project about language distribution in the city, the authors trace correlations between language and script choice and the private/public ownership of businesses, describing a tendency for non-official actors to eschew the national language of Hebrew in favour of the Roman script. In Tulp’s (1978) survey of advertising billboards in the suburbs of Brussels, she argues that they contribute to a local shift in language practices and ideologies away from Flemish towards French. Among Tulp’s conclusions is the hypothesis – of foundational importance to LL research – that the visibility of a language in the public space is linked to people’s perceptions of that language and to its status relative to other languages. Monnier’s (1989) investigation of Montreal makes the case for the paysage linguistique (‘linguistic landscape’) to contribute to assessments of language hierarchies, particularly in settings of language conflict. Another important work is Spolsky and Cooper’s (1991) monograph on language distribution in Jerusalem. Building on the Rosenbaum et al. (1977) study, they present a variety of matrices through which to explore language choice, including ‘types’ of signs (e.g. street signs, warning notices, commemorative plaques, graffiti) and their origin (local, national, international) and authorship status (official, private, commercial). In a study of great theoretical importance for the LL field, Scollon and Scollon (2003) provide a framework to account for the situatedness of meaning (‘discourses in place’), drawing attention to the sociocultural contexts through which signs are created in a system they term geosemiotics. A significant recent foundation for the LL field was laid by a special issue of the International Journal of Multilingualism (Gorter 2006), which heralded the LL as ‘a new approach to multilingualism’. As with other research belonging to what has been described as LL’s ‘first wave’ (Woldemariam and Lanza 2015: 177), its four papers all include some degree of quantitative surveying of mono- and multilingual signs, classified as either bottom-up (non-official) or top-down (official), alongside a number of other variables, to explore what public signs can tell us about the multilingual picture of the places, people, and ideologies which construct them. Another fundamental development was presaged by Jaworski and Thurlow (2010), who posit the concept of ‘semiotic landscapes’ as a critical expansion of the definitions of languages 338

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and the landscapes in which they are found. Building on a foundation of social semiotics, they foreground the importance of multiple modes of meaning, including imagery, movement, and spatial practices for the construction of the public space. This collection and numerous subsequent studies emphasize how the discursive modalities of everyday life – texts, images, non-verbal communication, the built environment, and global political, social, and economic trends – merge to form contemporary landscapes and their structures of meaning. Such ‘semiotic assemblages’ (Pennycook 2017) vastly expand how we interpret both language systems and the qualities and functions of the landscapes in which they are found and the many media and modes through which they can be constructed and deconstructed. This selection of important studies initiated many of the critical and methodological discussions that would follow in subsequent years, borne out in dedicated panels, colloquia, and keynote talks at major international conferences and symposia, as well as in a dedicated series of international LL workshops, beginning in Tel Aviv in 2008 and subsequently in Italy, Ethiopia, Belgium, South Africa, the USA, the UK, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Thailand, Sweden, Germany, and most recently in Spain in 2023. A series of edited volumes has stemmed from the workshops (Shohamy and Gorter 2009b; Shohamy et al. 2010; Hélot et al. 2012; Blackwood et al. 2016; Malinowski and Tufi 2020), as well as dozens of standalone articles, and the establishment of a dedicated journal, Linguistic Landscape, in 2015.

Critical issues and topics The themes of hierarchy and contestation are threaded consistently through much of the historic LL work discussed in the previous section. Signs within any given space are in a constant state of competition as they vie for visibility and the attention of passers-by (Shohamy 2006: 110), and significant critical attention has been paid to the (in)visibility of languages of communities who share (or who are expected to share) common space. For this reason it has been argued, since at least the first LL workshop in 2008, that the discipline shares a ‘natural link’ with the field of language policy (Shohamy and Gorter 2009a: 6). Related parallels have been drawn with theories surrounding symbolic power relations (Bourdieu 1990) and the presentation-ofself (Goffman 1963, 1981). Consequently, early LL studies began to explore how far language policies, attitudes, and practices may be directly represented by signs and could therefore be assessed, and possibly predicted, according to the distribution of languages in the public space. These early discussions around hierarchy and competition led to a spate of studies exploring minority/majority relationships in LLs around the world. These have centred on ethnic and immigrant groups and on autochthonous minority languages. The year 2012 saw the publication of a collection of 16 chapters devoted solely to this topic (Gorter et al. 2012). Tackling this through the LL lens has led to different theorizations about the position and status of minority languages. This has been rationalized in terms of physical space, such as a Slovene-Italian language border in Trieste (Tufi 2013), the rural village of Cee in Galicia (Dunlevy 2012), and the streets around the Cathedral in Strasbourg (Bogatto and Bothorel-Witz 2012). Equally, genre has proved to be a useful perspective not only for assessing minority/majority language relations, but multilingualism more widely. Totemic in early LL research, the street sign retains its potency as a socially recognizable set of LL data (Busch 2013; Amos 2017; Järlehed 2017; Tufi 2020a), whilst Androutsopoulos and Chowchong (2021) argue for the use of genre as an entry point for multimodal analyses of signage. The extent to which ethnolinguistic communities achieve visibility in the LL is often inflected by social issues, including marginalization, centre-periphery dynamics, and systemic injustice as a consequence of language policies. The visibility/invisibility binary has been refracted through the prism of linguistic vitality, but it 339

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now appears the settled conclusion of scholars working in this area that no correlation can be drawn between the extent to which a language appears or does not appear in the public space and its usage by the communities present. Authorship emerges early on as an important consideration in LL analysis, in part as a response to the generalist principles behind the top-down/bottom-up and dominant/dominated binaries of early quantitative work. Malinowski (2009) provides the first LL survey dedicated to the human agency behind signs, combining a systematic analysis of small business signs with interviews of their owners. His findings are thought-provoking for designers of quantitative LL methods, in that meanings of signs that might otherwise be assumed intentional and deliberate can in fact remain hidden both to the observer ‘and to the writers [themselves]’ (p. 124). Subsequent studies have engaged with authorship in different ways, notably through an approach which has been described as ethnographic (e.g. Blommaert 2013; Lou 2016; Stroud and Mpendukana 2009), although in some cases this is limited to interviews of LL actors rather than embedded, experience-based ethnography in the traditional sense. Important parallel developments in the field have seen a critical examination of the terms ‘linguistic’ and ‘landscape’. For many, language is essentialized as named languages expressed on written texts, and landscape as the public space of towns, cities, and villages and usually a selection of streets or individual places therein. For others – particularly those following the ‘semiotic assemblages’ perspective described in the previous section – multimodal explorations of LLs now frequently move beyond the scope of the prototypical ‘linguistic’ sign in the prototypical ‘landscape’ street, analyzing diverse phenomena from smells (Pennycook and Otsuji 2015) to urban regeneration (Baro 2020).

Current contributions and research In this section, we identify some of the main issues under investigation in LL research, including areas of scholarship discussed here (language teaching, second-language acquisition, and activism). Several of these areas are, at the very least, cognate, and there is inevitably overlap between the issues we outline here.

Mobility, migration, and ethnoscapes The mobilities paradigm has proved to be particularly rich in terms of LL research, not least as a methodological development (including the post-modern walking tour proposed by Garvin (2010) and discussed in Section ‘Main research methods’). The notion of mobility as a key factor in narratives of place, and in particular the social construction of space and place is addressed in settings as diverse as the Stockholm metro system (Karlander 2018) and South African townships (Stroud and Mpendukana 2009). Tufi (2020b) recognizes that mobility is not merely voluntary but can often be forced and lead to the creation of local sociabilities which deploy translocal literacies as well as rearranging ethnolinguistic boundaries. These questions invite reconsiderations of migration, and – notably – what have been referred to as ethnoscapes. There is a considerable body of research into Chinatowns (for example, Amos 2016; Leeman and Modan 2009; Lou 2016; Lee and Lou 2018; Wu et al. 2020), which has done much to further our understanding of people, communities, and both the production and consumption of multilingual signage as a cultural text (Lou 2016). Despite the salience of Chinatowns in scholarship in this area, the phenomenon of commercial and residential ethnic districts is not limited to one single ethnic group. Woldemariam and Lanza (2015) articulate the connections between diaspora communities and transnationalism in their study of Little 340

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Ethiopia in Washington, DC, and these ethnic districts can be found in many different parts of the world, wherever groups of identifiable ethnicities gather.

The human dimension It may seem surprising to identify the individual as an area of scholarship for a handbook devoted to applied linguistics when humans (arranged in groups, communities, and societies) are the defining characteristic of the field. Notwithstanding, bodies were initially absent from earlier LL research – or, more accurately, they were implicit but invariably invisible. Peck and Stroud (2015) are credited with bringing bodies to the fore, starting with the South African context where skinscapes have particular resonance both during and post-apartheid. The focus on bodies includes but is not limited to tattoos with Peck et al. (2019: 2) contending that ‘a primary focus of study could well be on the person rather than on the place, and the field could benefit from an even stronger emphasis on viewing place through person in commonality’. Kitis and Milani (2015) are notable early adopters of the body as discursive practice, considering ‘platform events’ and ‘confrontational encounters’ using the example of Greek anarchists in their discussion of the reconfiguration of space.

Protest A clear thread exploring questions of protest runs through LL research, and the landmarks of dissent over the past three decades have been analyzed using methodologies and approaches refined by this field of study. Two early lines of enquiry opened up, focusing on the Occupy movement and what has come to be referred to as the Arab Spring, but there have been other interesting discussions on the transient nature of protest and the role of protest in collective identity formation. From the work on both Occupy and the Arab Spring, we highlight the spatial turn in LL research, where emphasis shifts from the named and countable languages of early work on multilingualism to the spatialization practices and discursive formations activated by the occupation of public spaces (Martín Rojo 2016). The code choice of signage in protests is evoked in research from the Arab Spring, as well as a strong current of critical discourse analysis, reviewing the themes and frames of the messages displayed by protestors. Much of this research has been underpinned by important early work by Hanauer, who has drawn on scholarship from trauma studies (in his 2004 examination of graffiti at the site of the assassination of Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin) and highlighted the transitory nature of protests and their ephemeral meaning-making potential (Hanauer 2012). Nevertheless, the impermanence of protest signage has been re-evaluated by Waksman and Shohamy (2016) who analyzed the reappropriation of materials from social protests when the signage is transposed to alternative sites (for posterity or commemoration) and concluded that there can be a disjuncture between the original intention behind protest signage and their iteration in a new setting.

Memorialization The analysis of monuments, statues, and museums has proved to be fertile terrain in LL research, sometimes in conjunction with questions of multilingualism, and elsewhere in relation to language policies, inter-group relations, and power dynamics (see, for example, Blackwood and Macalister 2020). The privileging of ‘language’ both as bound, named languages and as an increasingly wide range of meaning-making resources has highlighted the potential for LL research to inform wider debates within the humanities and social sciences on memorialization. 341

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The partiality of monuments and memory places is not in question, but LL research meaningfully interrogates the easy binaries of remembering/forgetting, including/excluding within sociohistorical contexts to probe the idea that language(s) can be used ‘symbolically’ within memorialization projects. Equally, LL contributions to memory studies attend to questions beyond multilingualism, considering the role of images and languages in counter-monuments, such as Ben-Rafael and Ben-Rafael (2016), who trace the intensification of the persecution of Jews in the Schöneberg district of Berlin.

Sexuality Amongst the human characteristics that could possibly be explored in the LL, sexuality has attracted the most scholarly attention, with gender as an allied research area. Many of the questions addressed consider the queering of LL studies, although Trinch and Snajdr (2018) interrogate how gentrification and gender intersect in identity formation, based on their longitudinal study of Brooklyn, New York. Milani has driven much of the research to rethink the LL as a forum for investigating spatialization practices of sexuality, evoking protest (such as the Safe Zones campaign in Johannesburg in Milani 2013), pinkwashing (Milani and Levon 2016), and the spatial politics of sexuality (Milani et al. 2018).

Main research methods While far-reaching in terms of research goals and contextual focus, the basic premise of any LL methodology is to record and analyse examples of public meaning-making. In the discipline’s formative years, meaning was understood as located in texts on signs visible in the streets; as the field has evolved this has widened to other forms of semiosis, across numerous interpretations of public space. The beach-as-text metaphor discussed by Pennycook (2019) is useful in understanding this expansion: having identified the sand, sea, sun, holidaymakers, parasols, ice creams, and so on as signs with meaning potentials, an LL analysis proposes an organization of these semiotic elements into particular forms of discourse and discursive practices. One may reasonably describe such discourses as ‘languages’, given their systemic shaping of the space. However, there is much debate about where lines can and should be drawn when considering units of analysis such as these. Indeed, this was identified as a key issue before the first international workshop (Backhaus 2009; Spolsky 2009), but it is evidently a less central concern in the qualitative studies which have since become more prominent. Methods for analyzing multilingual relationships of texts on signs quickly emerged, many taking a lead from Backhaus’ (2006, 2007) large-scale surveys in Japan, themselves based on an earlier schema developed by Reh (2004), which classifies multilingualism according to the degree to which informational content between codes can be described as duplicating, overlapping, fragmentary, or complementary. Building on earlier theories of social semiotics and systemic functional grammar (Halliday 1978; Hodge and Kress 1988), visual design and design language (Kress and Van Leeuwen 1996, 2001), and place semiotics (Scollon and Scollon 2003), the materiality of signs is an established consideration in quantitative surveying, permitting comparisons of, for example, the resources available to different authors, the permanence of signs, and the varying importance that passers-by might ascribe to signs etched into stone, scribbled on Postit notes, spray-painted on walls, or displayed using colourful fluorescent lighting. At the same time, studies began to record the function of signs alongside these characteristics, in order to explore how far these variables relate to the purpose and intended audience of signs in the LL. Terms such as ‘areas of activity’ (Ben-Rafael et al. 2006) and ‘social realms’ (Reh 2004) were 342

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introduced to categorize contexts, such as food, finance, fashion, transport, education, leisure, health, religion, and beauty. Echoing the text-type method of Spolsky and Cooper (1991), a number of surveys began to develop typologies of sign types, for example, street signs, establishment names, slogans, and instructions (Franco-Rodríguez 2009; Blackwood 2010; Amos 2016). Elsewhere, signs have been understood in the context of Goffman’s (1974) ‘frames’ of social action and classified in domains such as commerce, civic administration, immigration, and tourism (Coupland and Garrett 2010; Kallen 2010; Coupland 2012). While many of these ideas have been developed qualitatively, a small number of studies have proposed large-scale surveys of thousands of signs, for the purposes of inferential statistical analysis or variationist comparisons within and between corpora (Amos and Soukup 2020; Lyons 2020). The recording of data itself has attracted methodological innovation, beyond the counting and coding of items by a single researcher. This includes the ‘walking tour’ approach, where interviews are conducted with participants (often local residents) as they pass through the space with the aim of analyzing how individuals interpret and interact with the LL (Garvin 2010; Stroud and Jegels 2014; Szabó and Troyer 2017). Technology plays a growing role, too, and studies now explore eye-tracking and perceptual psychological testing as further means to interpret signs and reader reactions (Vingron et al. 2017; Mitschke 2019). Additional methodological innovations are represented by the smartphone applications LinguaSnapp (Gaiser and Matras 2021) and Lingscape (Purschke 2021), which build on the data-triangulation approach first employed by Barni and Bagna (2009), harnessing crowdsourcing to construct large-scale, publicly accessible datasets.

Recommendations for practice The scope for LL to play a transformative role in language learning was identified when researchers first coalesced around the concept of language in the public space, and momentum continues to build in several kinds of initiatives. First, there are those who seek to use languages (in the strict sense of bound, named languages) in second-language acquisition, often involving practical application and on-the-street activities (e.g. Cenoz and Gorter 2008). This has been particularly fruitful for teachers of languages identified with ethnic districts in cities, such as Chinatowns and Koreatowns. Where students are learning languages that saturate certain parts of a city, there is ample opportunity – on the basis of extensive preparation by the teaching team – to use these districts as dynamic resources, with recognition and comprehension exercises. As early as 2012, Malinowski (2016) designed a module for students of East Asian languages, known as Reading the Multilingual City, which signalled the capacity for Japantown, for example, to activate literacy skills in the target language. Clearly, this is not limited to the acquisition of second languages by English speakers; there is an equally long tradition of exploring the learning of English in the public space, and here questions of globalese, varieties of English, and debates around prescriptivism can be invoked. Malinowski’s (2016) study, presented as ‘a teaching account’, points to the second possibility for the LL in practice, closely allied and often enmeshed with the first, which might be described broadly as language awareness but includes ethnographical approaches, as well as introducing concepts such as multilingualism, translanguaging, and transnationalism as lived realities (see also Malinowski et al. 2021). This question of reflexivity can be fruitfully pursued within the precincts of schools, colleges, and universities, and the exploration of schoolscapes (Brown 2012; Seals 2021). Ease of access is a clear advantage, and text-focused activities (including the range of resources deployed by school managers) serve not only to open up 343

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discussions on language awareness but also bring a critical lens to bear on ideologies in educational establishments. An allied perspective is the one that might best be described as activism, with a strong element of social justice, where, as described by Shohamy and Waksman (2009: 314), LLs serve as sites for ‘critical pedagogy, activism and language rights’. This, they contend, is a logical next step after critical language awareness; a number of projects have invited students not merely to reflect on their own language practices and beliefs but also examine examples of developing attention to linguistic injustice. Shohamy and Pennycook (2021) discuss a study which encouraged students to develop a sense of critical activism by proposing modifications to signs they had identified in order to redress marginalization and inequalities.

Future directions LL research is clearly burgeoning with developments in a range of different directions, including in the areas outlined in the ‘Recommendations for practice’ section. There is clear momentum behind the research and scholarship into maximizing the potential of language in the public space for second-language acquisition, critical language awareness, and activism. A number of developments in the social sciences and humanities are yet to be experienced to their full effect within LL studies. The digital turn, embraced by many disciplines which contribute to the work that informs and underpins much interpretation of meaning-making in the public space, is yet to be fully considered in LL research. In one sense, the digital revolution was the midwife to the field of LL, given the fact that the invention and rapid evolution of digital imaging (including the advancement of cameras in mobile telephones) expedited the capture and processing of data from the streets. However, whilst engagement with digital methods might be advanced within the field, the question of digital data is unresolved. Debates centre on the extent to which the online constitutes the LL, especially for those for whom the border between private and (semi-)public space demarcates what does and what does not constitute acceptable data. There have been tentative explorations of the LL within the arts, and the analysis of meaning-making resources as they appear in literature, in film, and on television and in painting (as well as other forms of art) is potentially a fruitful dynamic in terms of furthering our understanding. Engagement with reading and negotiating signage – returning to some of the earliest data considered in LL research – has featured in literature for some time, and the question of literary engagement with the field is ripe for a more profound consideration. The medical humanities are already a domain for some pioneering work in LL studies, with discussions of how persons with aphasia or dementia navigate healthcare provision presaging the scope for engaging with the sociolinguistics of ageing. The cross-fertilization between fields traditionally identified as the sciences and those which contribute to LL activities is likely to prove highly productive in the realignment of research in the light of the COVID19 pandemic. Early work has already begun to investigate semiosis in public spaces during the various waves of the pandemic and an obvious next stage is to bring in perspectives from scholarship as diverse as social psychology, neurology, and microbiology in order to meet the potential that LL promises in addressing linguistic prejudices and exclusion.

Related topics conceptualizing language learning and language education; second and additional language acquisition across the lifespan; language teaching methodology; language and culture; 344

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literacy; multilingualism; language policy and planning; identity; language and politics; social semiotics and multimodality; language and materiality; minority/Indigenous language revitalization

Further reading Blackwood, R., Tufi, S. and Amos, W. (forthcoming) The Bloomsbury Handbook of Linguistic Landscapes, London: Bloomsbury. (This forthcoming text constitutes the first comprehensive handbook dedicated entirely to LLs. Providing a thorough synopsis of the methods and theories that have thus far shaped the field, it analyzes diverse contexts ranging from graffiti and street signs to tattoos and literature, visible in sites as diverse as city centres, rural settings, schools, protest marches, museums, war-torn landscapes, and the Internet.) Kress, G. and Van Leeuwen, T. (2020) Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. 3rd ed., London: Routledge. (The third edition of this seminal textbook introduces new material on digital media and multimodality. The authors explore numerous examples to unpick the multifarious ways by which images communicate meaning, offering a comprehensive guide for reading non-textual objects in real-world settings.) Roux, S. D., Peck, A. and Banda, F. (2019) ‘Playful female skinscapes: Body narrations of multilingual tattoos’, International Journal of Multilingualism, 16(1): 25–41. (This article forms part of the LL interest in bodies as objects of linguistic interest. This study explores students’ tattoos at three universities in South Africa, asking important questions about identity, gender, and performativity and the assembled semiotics of bodies and body art.) Scollon, R. and Scollon, S. (2003) Discourses in Place: Language in the Material World, New York: Routledge. (Of paramount importance for any LL scholar, this textbook provides a key guide to social semiotics and the sociocultural interpretation of meaning in the built environment. The authors use a steady flow of varied examples to explore the structures of meaning and discourse on physical objects, thus providing a theoretical basis for many LL work that has followed.)

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27 Minoritized/Indigenous language revitalization Nancy H. Hornberger and Haley De Korne

Introduction Indigenous and minoritized languages on every continent have been damaged for centuries due to colonial, post-colonial, and ongoing globalizing forces, accompanied also by the rise of languages of wider communication such as English or Spanish. Language revitalization arose as a scholarly and activist focus of concern for linguists primarily after the 1990s, in conjunction with increasing alarm over endangerment of the world’s languages (see Sallabank and Austin, this volume). Yet it has become clear that speakers and language activists from minoritized and Indigenous language communities – whether tiny communities of the Amazon, island communities such as Japan’s Ryuku-ko, localized regions such as Brittany in France, or relatively large and dispersed communities like those of Andean Quechua, Scandinavian North Sámi, South African Xhosa, or North American Navajo speakers – are not content to see their communicative practices fade away and have instead initiated strategies of language revitalization and reclamation, oftentimes calling on the involvement and activism of (applied) linguists, both Indigenous and ally (McIvor 2020). Acknowledging that not all ancestral language speakers self-identify as Indigenous, we here refer to minoritized/Indigenous (M/I) languages and communities, including, for example, the original languages of Africa spoken before European colonization and up to the present, as well as the creoles developed by many formerly enslaved peoples, but not including minoritized immigrant and diaspora languages around the world, though they undergo many parallel issues and processes. Applied linguists1 have been and continue to be productively involved with M/I scholars and activists in initiatives ‘to increase the presence of an endangered or dormant language in the speech community and/or the lives of individuals’ (italics in original, Hinton et al. 2018: xxvi). These activities include basic linguistic research; educational policy, curriculum, materials, and teacher development; and language learning and teaching across multiple domains including not only schools and preschools but also home, family, workplace, community, and informal learning spaces. This is not to say that applied linguistic work has been uncritically nor unproblematically taken up in revitalization initiatives: issues of authenticity, ownership, and purpose regularly arise, demanding significant levels of reflection and dialogue among all participants (Berryman et al. 2013). Among possible topics identified by Indigenous scholar DOI: 10.4324/9781003082637-30

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McIvor (2020) for deepening collaborations and partnerships between applied linguists and M/I language revitalization scholars in the area of language learning are (1) conditions as to time, content, and opportunity; (2) strategies like land-based curriculum and programming; (3) learner attributes, including anxieties, motivation, and identity; and (4) dimensions such as pronunciation and assessment. Before taking up historical, current, and future perspectives, we clarify our approach to the role of applied linguists in M/I language revitalization. First, we use ‘language’ in the sense of communicative repertoire, socially situated in communicative practice and often characterized by inequalities, as articulated early on by Hymes (1980) and now widely accepted by applied linguists and language scholars. Second, we see language revitalization as a complex social endeavour fundamentally about language use and language rights. We view the practices and goals that make up language revitalization broadly, including efforts focused on language vitality, political status, and educational, family, and social use. Finally, our stance is deeply infused with a concern for social justice to flourish in and through this work. We write as allies of Indigenous scholars and communities we have been honoured to work with.

Historical perspectives Minoritized and Indigenous languages have lived histories dating back to time immemorial, through eras of contact with other Indigenous and later non-Indigenous peoples, followed by colonial policies leading to widespread destruction and demise, up to present-day, ongoing reclamation and recovery (Smith 2012 [1999]; McIvor 2020; see also Sallabank and Austin, this volume). Applied linguists’ scholarly concern with language revitalization movements or initiatives undertaken on behalf of Indigenous or otherwise minoritized languages to recuperate and/or increase the uses and users of the language are closely related to earlier sociolinguistic concerns with vitality (Stewart 1968) and revival (Haugen 1966) generally from a top-down or outsider stance. More recent work by sociolinguists and applied linguists engages insider and how-to perspectives on language renewal (Brandt and Ayoungman 1989), reversing language shift (Fishman 1991), language planning from the bottom up (Hornberger 1997), and Indigenous language reclamation (Leonard 2017). Wyman (2012) uses Anishinaabe literary scholar Vizenor’s term ‘survivance’ to characterize Indigenous people’s ‘linguistic survivance’ – the ways that individuals and communities use specific languages, but also second languages, language varieties and linguistic features, as well as bilingualism and translanguaging . . . as they shape collective identities, practices and knowledge systems in challenging or hostile circumstances, and through participation in translocal, as well as local, spheres of influence. (2012: 14) Understandings of language revitalization, reclamation, and survivance have thus become more nuanced and contextualized over time. The ‘Small Languages and Language Communities’ column published by Dorian across several decades in the International Journal of the Sociology of Language is perhaps the oldest, continuous sociolinguistic scholarly space highlighting ancestral languages and exemplifying perspectives from both top-down comparative analysis and bottom-up analysis of local cases. Dorian’s book Small-language Fates and Prospects (2014) collects her essays from across four decades, grounded in her long-term research on East Sutherland Gaelic in northeast Scotland 350

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and bringing together her many conceptual contributions to the field of language shift and revitalization, including her proposed semi-speaker with some communicative competence; the notion of tip or breakpoint in transmission processes of languages undergoing shift; and ideologies of language loyalty and language purism. Similarly prolific and ground-breaking scholarship across decades has been linguist Hinton’s activism for Native American languages, beginning from her earliest collaborations with Native California language activists in the 1970s up through her several authored and (co) edited volumes documenting her well-known and widespread revitalization initiatives such as mentor-apprentice programs and the Breath of Life Archival Institute for Indigenous Languages combining revitalization and documentary linguistics (Baldwin et al. 2018). The Green Book of Language Revitalization in Practice (Hinton and Hale 2001) and Bringing Our Languages Home (Hinton 2013) foreground the voices of Indigenous language activists and highlight their resourcefulness and creativity. Internationally, sociolinguists and applied linguists, across the last several decades, have turned their attention to ideological and implementational spaces opened up by multilingual language policies for language revitalization through education (Hornberger et al. 2018). Many of these scholars have engaged in orthography, curriculum, and materials development for Indigenous language education, as well as Indigenous language teacher professional education, while also researching and documenting their ongoing efforts. In Latin America, since the 1970s, Indigenous and ally applied linguists have collaborated and contributed alongside Indigenous political and educational activists in the rise of intercultural bilingual education initiatives enabled through constitutional and educational reforms acknowledging multiethnicity, multiculturalism, and multilingualism, in turn a response to Indigenous resurgence and political mobilization (see López 2022; López and Sichra 2016 for reviews). Similarly, in the Global Far North, where the Sámi experienced centuries of stigmatization and forced assimilation through schooling under colonial policies of Finland, Norway, and Sweden, by the 1970s the  ethnopolitical  Sámi  movement  had  been  gaining  strength,  and  the  official  view  started  to  affirm protection and promotion of M/I languages, regarded as part of the national heritage of these countries (Magga 1994). Maintenance and revitalization of Sámi language and culture became the task of the compulsory school system in all three countries, and different models were gradually developed, frequently with the collaboration and contributions of Indigenous and ally applied linguists and language educators (see Huss 2017 for a review). A  well-known  example  of  language  revitalization  through  education  is  Māori  preschool  immersion or the kohanga reo  (‘language  nest’)  movement,  a  bottom-up  initiative  of  Māori  communities beginning in the 1980s, since taken up by Indigenous communities in Hawai’i, Mexico, and Finland and across the globe, accompanied by a significant interdisciplinary research literature (e.g. Hill 2017; Pasanen 2010). Similarly, pathbreaking school-based initiatives in Native American bilingual education beginning in the 1960s have been documented for both their innovation and the severe top-down constraints they have struggled against (e.g. Crawley 2020 on Crow; McCarty 2002 on Navajo; McCarty 2018 on Native America). In both the Māori and Navajo cases, actors in bottom-up community-based initiatives have taken  leadership roles in wedging open policy spaces, such as New Zealand’s eventual ministrylevel recognition and oversight of kohanga reo and Maori-immersion education at primary (kura kaupapa), secondary, and tertiary education levels (Bishop et al. 2014), and Rough Rock School actors’ role in advocating for the US Native American Languages Act (McCarty 2002; Warhol 2012). Education has been an important and enduring arena for M/I language revitalization initiatives and research, with recognition of both successes and challenges reflected in titles like 351

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‘Why is this so hard? Ideologies of endangerment, passive language learning approaches, and Ojibwe in the United States’ (King and Hermes 2014). Over the decades, answers to these questions and the involvement of applied linguists, both Indigenous and ally, have taken on more critical recognition of the ways colonial histories and global socioeconomic, demographic, and political forces shape M/I language revitalization and reclamation efforts in education.

Critical issues and topics There have been significant gains for Indigenous peoples’ basic human rights, notably the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, UNDRIP, including language rights (a.k.a. linguistic human rights), long a focus of advocacy for M/I peoples (e.g. Declaration of Recife 1988; Hamel 1997; May 2012 [2001]). There has also been critique among applied (socio)linguists of strong claims for linguistic human rights and discourses of language endangerment which may tend to essentialize Indigenous peoples, their languages, and their relationships to nature and to displace a concern for speakers onto a concern for languages as fixed entities (Duchêne and Heller 2007; see also the discussion of ideologies of language-as-code and language-as-social-interaction in language reclamation work in HenneOchoa et al. 2020). Yet linguistic human rights – the rights to use one’s language and be free from discrimination in doing so (Macías 1979) – are very real when seen from the point of view not of the language but of the speakers. Indigenous language reclamation strategies, or ‘place-specific actions through which individuals or groups are countering forms of marginalization’ (De Korne and Leonard 2017: 5) include (1) ways of framing/talking about language endangerment; (2) methodological moves away from conservation oriented documentation toward useoriented reclamation; (3) educational initiatives to include and make spaces for Indigenous languages resisting purist and hierarchical ideologies; and (4) political and personal forms of advocacy. Indeed, negotiation and reclamation of Indigenous epistemologies, language ideologies, speakerhoods, identities, and investment (see Norton and Shank Lauwo, this volume) in language learning continue to be complex and compelling topics in Indigenous language revitalization practices and research. How has the ‘multilingual turn’ in applied linguistics been taken up in M/I language revitalization? Purism-versus-compromise remains as compelling a paradox as when Dorian formulated it (Dorian 1994). More recently, discussions of co-existing monoglossic and heteroglossic language ideologies (see Li Wei, this volume) highlight points of real tension in Indigenous speakers’ lived experience and in applied linguistics research and practice, such as the challenges of keeping space for Basque in Spain (Cenoz and Gorter, this volume) or the dilemma of Indigenous leaders obliged to represent state-mandated monoglossic versions of their language at odds with Indigenous speakers’ heteroglossic communicative practices (Limerick 2021). Not least are the implications for language assessment, an understudied area in M/I language revitalization (McIvor 2020). Increased consideration of other critical – and unresolved – topics in M/I language revitalization include the role of intergenerational transmission, perhaps not the sine qua non originally proposed by Fishman (1991) but still needed (Romaine 2006), as well as the roles of families and family language policy more generally (Hinton 2013; Patrick et al. 2013), youth and youth registers (Kvietok Dueñas 2019; Wyman et al. 2014), cultural activists such as hip-hop artists (Williams 2017), new speakers (Jaffe 2015), and other non-education and non-policy-maker actors. Research and practice increasingly call for ecological approaches to language revitalization, emphasizing not only all communicative varieties in a particular language ecology but also 352

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actors and actions across family, school, community, societal, and supranational levels, as well as across time scales in that ecology, and at every educational level, from the very youngest learners (e.g. Anzures Tapia [2020] on Maya Indigenous preschoolers) to youth (e.g. Zavala [2019] on youth repoliticization of Quechua in Peru) to higher education (e.g. Kamwendo et al. [2013] on isiZulu at the University of KwaZulu-Natal) (see Cowley, this volume). Language revitalization initiatives are fundamentally critical, anti-racist, and decolonizing in their intent and their practice, rooted as they are in Indigenous resistance to centuries of colonial pressures, enslavement, discrimination, and marginalization. They are about decoloniality understood not as ‘the absence or overcoming of coloniality, . . . but the postures, positionings, horizons, projects, and practices of being, thinking, sensing, and doing that resist and re-exist, that transgress and interrupt the colonial matrix of power’ (Walsh 2020: 606). In her conceptualization of radical resurgence, Nishnaabeg Indigenous scholar Leanne Simpson calls on Indigenous peoples to regenerate the processes and ways of living of our ancestors, our practices, our grounded normativity, within an Indigenous criticality . . . figuring out how to center this in our individual lives and in the collectivities of which we are a part. (Simpson 2016: 26–27)

Current contributions and research Current research on language revitalization continues to expand the geographic and sociolinguistic scope of the field, bringing to light the unique circumstances of minoritized groups in different parts of the world, including Asia (Hammine 2020), Siberia (Ferguson 2019), Africa (Joseph and Ramani 2012), Europe (Smith-Christmas et al. 2017), and urban and diaspora contexts (Patrick et al. 2013) (also Cocq and Sullivan 2019; Hinton et al. 2018; Sherris and Peyton 2019). The circumstances that surround language revitalization movements are diverse, as are the aims and ideologies of the people involved. In some cases, the language in question is not officially recognized and speakers are working towards basic rights, while in other cases there is legal support, but socioeconomic pressures and deep-seated prejudices impede progress. Some language activists pursue homogenous or standardized language use, while others may promote heterogenous, flexible communication (Lane et al. 2017). M/I language revitalization research has continued to explore the range of language ideologies that inform revitalization initiatives, highlighting that it is common for multiple ideologies and ideals of language, or ‘language ideological assemblages’ (Kroskrity 2018), to be present in any one revitalization initiative. Technologies in the lives of minoritized language speakers and learners is another area of growing exploration, including both consequences of increased presence of globally circulating languages through mass media and opportunities to use, promote, and teach minoritized languages through virtual channels (Galla 2016; Outakoski 2013). Different geographic and ideological conditions across studies highlight that there is no ‘right’ way to go about language revitalization. No one approach can fit the opportunities, constraints, and priorities of the many contexts in which people are working to increase the status and use of a marginalized way of speaking. Instead, language revitalization practitioners must carefully consider the needs and possibilities of the context they are in. There are a growing number of language revitalization scholars who are speakers or members of a marginalized language community who have put forward arguments for the importance of considering the local particularities and priorities of minoritized language speakers. Language revitalization scholarship produced by community insiders is thus another positive 353

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trend in current research. Although there are several ground-breaking Indigenous scholars who have been working in this area for decades (e.g. Bishop and Glynn 1999; Coronel-Molina 1999; Zepeda 1995), Indigenous and minority language scholars have increasingly taken central roles in this field. Alongside calls from outsider, ally scholars to engage in more meaningful collaboration with minoritized language community members (e.g. Rice 2009), Indigenous scholars have set an agenda for language revitalization research where emic understandings of language and local goals for revitalization are front and centre (e.g. Hermes et al. 2012). Indigenous scholars have contributed nuanced insights into language revitalization dynamics in specific communities over time (e.g. Davis 2019; Meek 2010) as well as exploring crucial issues such as technology (Galla 2016), literacy (Outakoski 2021), pedagogy (Henne-Ochoa et al. 2020), and linguistic analysis (Begay 2017). These scholars have also been instrumental in making space for engaged forms of scholarship, such as action research and the integration of language revitalization stakeholders into the research process (discussed further in the following section). While minoritized scholars have become more visible in M/I language revitalization research, the field of language revitalization has also become more integral to applied linguistics2 (Cope and Penfield 2011) and to documentary linguistics (Sallabank and Austin, this volume). Recent trends in applied linguistics converge with concerns that have long been at the heart of language revitalization research and practice. Indigenous paradigms (southern theories), the interdependence of humans with the natural world (posthumanism; see Toohey, this volume), struggles for self-determination (decoloniality), and efforts towards equality for minoritized speakers (social justice) have long been explicit areas of focus in language revitalization; all of these have recently been the focus of interest among applied linguists in other contexts. The link between language and racism, another area attracting fresh attention in applied linguistics (see Delfino and Alim, this volume), has not been explored as directly in past revitalization research. However, some work has considered how racial stereotypes and structures impact minoritized language users (Haque and Patrick 2015; Muehlmann 2009), and this topic is gaining visibility (Leonard 2020). The trend towards applied linguistic research that considers a wider range of language learners and aims to improve social justice for disadvantaged learners (King 2016; Ortega, this Handbook, Volume 1) has helped to make the field of language revitalization more visible in broader discussions of language teaching and multilingualism. Teaching and learning minoritized languages in both formal and community-based settings have been prominent topics in language revitalization research as discussed in the previous sections, and this trend continues. In addition to examining pedagogical approaches at all levels, teacher education is an on-going challenge and area of investigation (Whitinui et al. 2018; Czaykowska-Higgins et al. 2017). In many contexts, educators are working to create learning resources and programs with minimal support, requiring creativity and tenacity. Learners are often faced with harmful stereotypes and sometimes unrealistic ideals (King and Hermes 2014; Walsh 2019). Language revitalization is inherently bilingual or multilingual, often with multiple dialects in the mix to boot. The presence of a monolingual bias in society, and often in education, can undermine the legitimacy of emergent multilingual learners (De Korne and Hornberger 2017). With this in mind, taking an inclusive, participatory, and meaning-focused pedagogical approach has been shown to be an effective way to bring learners into the language community (Henne-Ochoa et al. 2020). Whether in community-based settings, classrooms, or in virtual platforms, the issue of language learning is likely to remain an area of active investigation in applied linguistic studies of language revitalization. 354

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Main research methods While the linguistic response to language endangerment has been first and foremost to research the languages themselves (including language documentation and analysis of language contact effects), the response among scholars focusing on language revitalization has been more diverse and has focused on speakers of endangered languages and the sociopolitical and ideological environments they inhabit. As such, a holistic, ethnographic approach has been prevalent in studies of language shift and maintenance (see Tusting, this volume), as well as action or practitioner research. Other research approaches include comparative case studies, analysis of language and education policy and curriculum documents, use of census and survey data, and analysis of media discourses. This section provides a brief overview of these common research methods. Ethnographic studies of language revitalization have tended to include a broad focus on factors influencing language shift, as well as some of the processes supporting or hindering revitalization (Hornberger 1988; Meek 2010). Based on extended participant observation and often interviews in minoritized language communities, this approach demands a long-term commitment from the researcher, and the development of close, trusting relationships with stakeholders. As part of an ethnographic study, researchers often collect photographs of the linguistic landscape as well as documents or artefacts that may help to explain the context, such as learning materials or publicity for events. Ethnographic approaches have also been used by community insiders when studying their own language community (Coronel-Molina 2015; Davis 2019; Hammine 2020). Practitioner research or action research undertaken by community members and/or ally scholars is also common and can be combined with ethnographic approaches. The ethnographic monitoring approach, which fuses an ethnographic focus on emic perspectives with action research, has been promoted in relation to minoritized language schooling (De Korne and Hornberger 2017; Hymes 1980). This and other participatory approaches are in line with the long-standing call for ‘decolonising methodologies’ (Smith 2012 [1999]) and, more recently, ‘culturally-responsive methodologies’ (Berryman et al. 2013) that aim to keep the perspectives and goals of minoritized speakers and learners at the centre of the research endeavour. Considering that research on Indigenous peoples has historically occurred as a part of colonial and nationalist processes, a shift of priorities is part of changing that legacy. Both Indigenous and ally researchers have argued that increased collaboration and sharing of perspectives among researchers, speakers, learners, and other stakeholders can increase the quality and validity of research in this domain (Anthony-Stevens 2017; McIvor 2020). Increasing use of practitioner and action research is of clear benefit in language revitalization scholarship, as researchers often aim not only to understand sociolinguistic dynamics, but also to support increased equality for minoritized language speakers. Ethnographic and action research approaches take time to develop and to carry out, however, and may not be possible in all contexts. Analysis of language and education policy documents offers insight into the de jure policies that may restrict or support minoritized languages. Such policies exist across scales, from a single school to regional policies (e.g. recognition of Hawai’ian in the Hawai’i state constitution), national policies (e.g. recognition of nine African languages alongside English and Afrikaans in South Africa), and international policies (e.g. European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages and the UNDRIP). Analysis of de jure policy allows for comparison across contexts, and consideration of which policies are put into practice and which remain at the rhetorical level only (Zavala 2013). Analysis of minoritized language curricula likewise gives insight into the intended language practices in a school setting, which may or may not 355

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align with actual practices (Weinberg 2021). The combination of policy document analysis with ethnographic and/or interview methods can provide a wider lens on the sociolinguistic reality. While interest in legal regulations remains, there is a relatively greater focus in recent research on policy-in-practice (Davis and Phyak 2017) and ethnographic study of policies across scales (Hornberger et al. 2018). Census and survey data can illustrate broad trends in reported language use among a population. Government-run censuses generally do not contain adequate linguistic information (e.g. often not allowing participants to state the use of multiple home languages) and should therefore be used cautiously. Researchers’ surveys can capture language use with a more fine-grained lens and provide insights into broad trends (Pérez Báez et al. 2019). Self-reports from census or surveys can be combined with in-depth discussion of participants’ perspectives through interviews and/or focus groups and examination of actual practices through ethnography. A final research method that has shed light on language revitalization is discourse analysis, which has been employed in relation to the discourses produced by the popular media, by researchers, and by language activists (Duchêne and Heller 2007; Hill 2002; Moore et al. 2010). The way that different social actors talk (or write) about language revitalization has an effect on popular understandings and potentially on language practices. By analyzing rhetorical patterns and tropes about language revitalization and endangerment, these studies point out ways that key stakeholders are sometimes erased, and implied solutions do not line up with the complexities of the problem. This method allows for insights into ideological and discursive trends, although it is important to bear in mind that these trends may not be reflected in actual social practices.

Recommendations for practice Given the bottom-up and activist stance of language revitalization work, the field offers a proven array of practice-oriented recommendations, invariably undertaken and sustained with tenacity and hope despite obstacles and roadblocks in implementation. Practice recommendations include experiences and suggestions for teaching Indigenous languages, such as Outakoski’s (2013) virtual Sámi language teaching course at Umeå University in Sweden, Antia and Dyers’ (2019) decolonial pedagogy at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa, and McIvor et al.’s (2020) experience of recreating an online version of the Cree way of life as they adapted their language pedagogy to Native North American COVID-19 realities. Further recommendations include how-tos for mentor-apprentice programs and family revitalization efforts (Hinton 2013; Hinton and Hale 2001), as well as examples and discussion of LOPI – learning by observing and pitching in to family and community endeavours, an approach that situates Indigenous language learning within everyday Indigenous life (see Henne-Ochoa et al.’s LOPI example from Kaska First Nations in the Yukon and responses, in Bigelow and Engman 2020). Opening the scope beyond language teaching and family and community endeavours, De Korne (2021) documents a repertoire of strategies used by educators, students, writers, scholars, and cultural activists on behalf of linguistic equality for Isthmus Zapotec in Mexico. A place-based initiative combining formal education and community involvement as well as early childhood education and teacher preparation is Wakanyeja, ‘Sacred Little Ones’ (Lakota), an approach infusing language and culture into early childhood education for Native American children. Conceptualized and led by Yazzi-Mintz and situated at tribal colleges in Alaska, Wisconsin, Washington, and New Mexico, Wakanyeja has transformed the way early education teachers are trained, while also generating new curricula, fostering partnerships on 356

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and off reservations, and providing advocacy-oriented training and events for parents and communities.3 This exemplifies what M/I language revitalization practitioners can achieve when working tenaciously across scales to address language and learning holistically.

Future directions Future language revitalization scholars and practitioners will continue to face changing political, demographic, and social contexts that at times open doors for minoritized languages and speakers and at times put new barriers in their way. Identifying opportunities for the promotion and use of M/I languages as they appear remains an important area of focus – whether through developing supportive policies, positive discourses, pedagogical techniques, or personal strategies. Paralleling these initiatives, discourse, and practice within the language revitalization research community itself has been and will likely continue to be a topic of discussion and debate, with self-critiques and cautions against ‘expert rhetoric’ (Hill 2002) or linguistic extractivism (Davis 2017) and calls for decolonizing ‘language’ itself (Leonard 2017). As the sociolinguistic profile of speakers of M/I languages shifts towards a widespread bi-/multilingualism and the idealized monolingual native speaker becomes less common in many communities, more attention will be needed to support and legitimate younger speakers and learners who are the future of the M/I speech community. Likewise we anticipate – and hope – that the identity categories of language revitalization scholars and practitioners will continue to shift, with community insiders playing an increasingly central role and models for collaborative research and scholar allyship becoming more established. A broad approach to applied linguistics, encompassing language planning and policy, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and language education, is necessary in order consider the complex dynamics of language marginalization and revitalization, and future research is likely to continue to draw from concepts and methods across these fields and others. In their recent volume on the revitalization of Sámi and Ainu languages and cultures in this century, Roche et al. (2018: 5–6) adopt the term efflorescence to capture the sense of ‘prosperity, human flourishing, cultural creativity and surprise’ that accompanies the multimodal boom of language revitalization we are witnessing worldwide, in direct contradiction to the language ‘crisis’ that has so often characterized conversations about Indigenous peoples, in the past and now. Digital media in particular are increasingly present in the daily lives of M/I speakers, opening new opportunities for remote learning and interaction, as well as new channels through which dominating languages and ideologies may be imposed into local and personal spheres. The efflorescence of bottom-up strategies will remain of central importance in a digitized and transnational world.

Related topics multilingualism; endangered language and language documentation; ecology of language and language learning

Notes 1 Inclusive of all scholars involved in M/I language revitalization, ‘applied linguist’ here encompasses the multiple affiliated identities such scholars may occupy as linguists, sociolinguists, anthropological linguists, educational linguists, linguistic ethnographers, linguistic anthropologists of education, and more broadly, language education researchers and practitioners. Some are also members of M/I communities; some are not. 357

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2 A strand for language revitalization and maintenance has been created at the American Association of Applied Linguistics (AAAL) conference, a scholarship fund was established for Indigenous participants, several AAAL keynotes have addressed this topic, and the Modern Language Journal devoted the 2020 Perspectives column to language revitalization (Bigelow and Engman 2020), among other examples. 3 www.wkkf.org/what-we-do/featured-work/creating-stronger-connections-for-early-education-to-elementary-success-for-native-american-children

Further reading Coronel-Molina, S. and McCarty, T. (eds.) (2016) Indigenous Language Revitalization in the Americas, Abingdon, UK: Routledge. (Case studies of revitalization in North and South America) Hinton, L., Huss, L. and Roche, G. (eds.) (2018) The Routledge Handbook of Language Revitalization, Abingdon, UK: Routledge. (A global, up-to-date perspective on language revitalization research and practice) Hornberger, N. H. (ed.) (2008) Can Schools Save Indigenous Languages? Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. (An in-depth examination of language revitalization in the crucial domain of education) Whitinui, P., Rodríguez de France, C. and McIvor, O. (eds.) (2018) Promising Practices in Indigenous Teacher Education, Singapore: Springer Nature. (A global exploration of Indigenous language teaching and teacher education)

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Davis, J. L. (2017) ‘Resisting rhetorics of language endangerment: Reclamation through Indigenous language survivance’, Language Documentation and Description, 14: 37–58. Davis, J. L. (2019) Talking Indian: Identity and Language Revitalization in the Chickasaw Renaissance, Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Davis, K. A. and Phyak, P. (2017) Engaged Language Policy and Practices, Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Declaration of Recife (1988) ‘Declaration of recife’, Multilingua, 7(3): 368. DOI: 10.1515/ mult.1988.7.3.368 De Korne, H. (2021) Language Activism: Imaginaries and Strategies of Minority Language Equality, Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. De Korne, H. and Hornberger, N. H. (2017) ‘Countering unequal multilingualism through ethnographic monitoring’, in M. Martin-Jones and D. Martin (eds.), Researching Multilingualism: Critical and Ethnographic Perspectives, Abingdon, UK: Routledge, pp. 247–258. De Korne, H. and Leonard, W. Y. (2017) ‘Reclaiming languages: Contesting and decolonizing “language endangerment” from the ground up’, Language Documentation and Description, 14: 5–14. Dorian, N. C. (1994) ‘Purism vs. compromise in language revitalization and language revival’, Language in Society, 23: 479–494. Dorian, N. C. (2014) Small-Language Fates and Prospects: Lessons of Persistence and Change from Endangered Languages: Collected Essays, Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill. Duchêne, A. and Heller, M. (eds.) (2007) Discourses of Endangerment: Ideology and Interest in the Defence of Languages, London and New York: Continuum. Ferguson, J. (2019) Words Like Birds: Sakha Language Discourses and Practices in the City, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Fishman, J. A. (1991) Reversing Language Shift: Theoretical and Empirical Foundations of Assistance to Threatened Languages, Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. Galla, C. K. (2016) ‘Indigenous language revitalization, promotion, and education: Function of digital technology’, Computer Assisted Language Learning, 29(7). https://doi.org/10.1080/09588221.2016. 1166137 Hamel, R. E. (1997) ‘Linguistic human rights from a sociolinguistic perspective’, International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 127: entire. Hammine, M. (2020) Speaking My Language and Being Beautiful: Decolonizing Indigenous Language Education in the Ryukyus with a Special Reference to Sámi Language Revitalization. Ph.D. dissertation. Rovaniemi, Finland: Lapin Yliopisto/University of Lapland. http:// urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-952-337-194-1 Haque, E. and Patrick, D. (2015) ‘Indigenous languages and the racial hierarchisation of language policy in Canada’, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 36(1): 27–41. Haugen, E. (1966) ‘Linguistics and language planning’, in W. Bright (ed.), Sociolinguistics, The Hague: Mouton, pp. 50–71. Henne-Ochoa, R., Elliott-Groves, E., Meek, B. and Rogoff, B. (2020) ‘Pathways forward for Indigenous language reclamation: Engaging Indigenous epistemology and learning by observing and pitching in to family and community endeavors’, The Modern Language Journal, 104(2): 481–493. Hermes, M., Bang, M. and Marin, A. (2012) ‘Designing Indigenous language revitalization’, Harvard Educational Review, 82(3): 381–403. Hill, J. H. (2002) ‘“Expert Rhetorics” in advocacy for endangered languages: Who is listening, and what do they hear?’, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 12(2): 119–133. Hill, R. (2017) ‘Bilingual education in Aotearoa/New Zealand’, in O. García, A. Lin and S. May (eds.), Bilingual and Multilingual Education, Cham: Springer International Publishing, pp. 329–345. Hinton, L. (ed.) (2013) Bringing Our Languages Home: Language Revitalization for Families, Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books. Hinton, L. and Hale, K. (eds.) (2001) The Green Book of Language Revitalization in Practice, San Diego, CA: Academic Press. Hinton, L., Huss, L. and Roche, G. (eds.) (2018) The Routledge Handbook of Language Revitalization, Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Hornberger, N. H. (1988) Bilingual Education and Language Maintenance: A Southern Peruvian Quechua Case, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Hornberger, N. H. (ed.) (1997) Indigenous Literacies in the Americas: Language Planning from the Bottom Up, Berlin: Mouton. Hornberger, N. H., Anzures Tapia, A., Hanks, D. H., Kvietok Dueñas, F. and Lee, S. (2018) ‘Ethnography of language planning and policy’, Language Teaching, 51(2): 152–186. 359

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Huss, L. (2017) ‘Language education policies and the Indigenous and minority languages of northernmost Scandinavia and Finland’, in T. L. McCarty and S. May (eds.), Language Policy and Political Issues in Education, Cham: Springer International Publishing, pp. 367–381. Hymes, D. (1980) Language in Education: Ethnolinguistic Essays, Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics. Jaffe, A. (2015) ‘Defining the new speaker: Theoretical perspectives and learner trajectories’, International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 231: 21–44. Joseph, M. and Ramani, E. (2012) ‘“Glocalization”: Going beyond the dichotomy of global versus local through additive multilingualism’, International Multilingual Research Journal, 6(1): 22–34. Kamwendo, G., Hlongwa, N. and Mkhize, N. (2013) ‘On medium of instruction and African scholarship: The case of IsiZulu at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa’, Current Issues in Language Planning, 15(1): 75–89. King, K. A. (2016) ‘Who and what is the field of applied linguistics overlooking?: Why this matters and how educational linguistics can help’, Working Papers in Educational Linguistics, 31(2): 1–18. King, K. A. and Hermes, M. (2014) ‘Why is this so hard?: Ideologies of endangerment, passive language learning approaches, and Ojibwe in the United States’, Journal of Language, Identity and Education, 13(4): 268–282. Kroskrity, P. V. (2018) ‘On recognizing persistence in the Indigenous language ideologies of multilingualism in two Native American communities’, Language & Communication, 62: 133–144. Kvietok Dueñas, F. (2019) Youth Bilingualism, Identity and Quechua Language Planning and Policy in the Urban Peruvian Andes. Ph.D. dissertation. University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA. Lane, P., Costa, J. and De Korne, H. (eds.) (2017) Standardizing Minority Languages: Competing Ideologies of Authority and Authenticity in the Global Periphery, Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Leonard, W. Y. (2017) ‘Producing language reclamation by decolonizing “language”’, Language Documentation and Description, 14: 15–36. Leonard, W. Y. (2020) ‘Insights from Native American studies for theorizing race and racism in linguistics (response to Charity Hudley, Mallinson, and Bucholtz)’, Language, 96(4): e281–e291. https://doi. org/10.1353/lan.2020.0079 Limerick, N. (2021) Recognizing Indigenous Languages: Kichwa and the Double Binds of Intercultural Bilingual Education in Ecuador, Oxford: Oxford University Press. López, L. E. (2022). ‘El clamor del silencio y el despertar de la consciencia lingüística crítica entre las sociedades amerindias’, Living Languages • Lenguas Vivas • Línguas Vivas, 1(1): Article 2. https:// doi.org/https://doi.org/10.7275/3yxk-zv51 López, L. E. and Sichra, I. (2016) ‘Indigenous bilingual education in Latin America’, in O. Garcia, A. Lin and S. May (eds.), Bilingual and Multilingual Education, Cham: Springer International Publishing, pp. 381–393. Macías, R. (1979) ‘Language choice and human rights in the United States’, in J. Alatis (ed.) Languages in Public Life, Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, pp. 86–101. Magga, O. H. (1994) ‘The Sami Language Act’, in T. Skutnabb-Kangas and R. Phillipson (eds.), Linguistic Human Rights: Overcoming Linguistic Discrimination, Berlin: Mouton, pp. 219–233. May, S. (2012 [2001]) Language and Minority Rights: Ethnicity, Nationalism and the Politics of Language, 2nd ed., New York, NY: Routledge. McCarty, T. L. (2002) A Place to Be Navajo: Rough Rock and the Struggle for Self-Determination in Indigenous Schooling, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. McCarty, T. L. (2018) ‘So that any child may succeed: Indigenous pathways toward justice and the promise of Brown’, Educational Researcher, 47(5): 271–283. McIvor, O. (2020) ‘Indigenous language revitalization and applied linguistics: Parallel histories, shared futures?’, Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 40: 78–96. McIvor,  O.,  Sterzuk,  A.  and  Cook,  W.  (2020)  ‘i-kiyohkātoyāhk  (we  visit):  Adapting  nēhiyawēwin/ nīhithawīwin (Cree) language learning to the COVID-19 reality’, AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples, 16(4): 413–416. Meek, B. (2010) We Are Our Language: An Ethnography of Language Revitalization in a Northern Athabaskan Community, Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Moore, R., Pietikäinen, S. and Blommaert, J. (2010) ‘Counting the losses: Numbers as the language of language endangerment’, Sociolinguistic Studies, 4(1): 1–26. Muehlmann, S. (2009) ‘How do real Indians fish? Neoliberal multiculturalism and contested Indigeneities in the Colorado delta’, American Anthropologist, 111(4): 468–479. 360

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28 Endangered languages Julia Sallabank and Peter K. Austin

Introduction This chapter is about language shift, language loss, and language endangerment: what it means, why it is happening, and responses at individual and community levels, by policy-makers, and from academia. See also Hornberger and De Korne (this volume) on language revitalization.

Previous research The field of endangered languages study, which includes language documentation and description (also known as documentary linguistics), emerged in the 1990s in response to the prospective loss of a large proportion of world languages this century. According to one frequently cited source, Ethnologue,1 ‘7,139 languages are spoken today’, of which 42% are endangered – that is, ‘users begin to teach and speak a more dominant language to their children’. The respective responses of academia, policy-makers, and communities to what has been called a worldwide crisis (Krauss 1992; Roche 2022) reflect the different ways in which it affects them. Policy-makers may see linguistic diversity as an expensive or divisive impediment to national unity; if governments support minority language maintenance, it is often through bilingual education as a transition to a national language. Academic linguists decry loss of linguistic diversity, and thus of data, especially for cross-language comparison, classification, and history; they have responded by documenting and describing languages before they disappear (language preservation), often focusing on rare or interesting features. Languages are seen as a scientific resource or a treasure for all humankind (a view also promoted by international organizations like UNESCO as ‘intangible cultural heritage’). For linguistic communities, language shift and loss may be felt in a far more immediate and personal manner as just one outcome of discriminatory policies, marginalization, and demographic and sociopolitical changes. Responses need to take these into account. Communities have undertaken language and cultural revitalization programmes, some long-standing, such as Māori  (New  Zealand),  Hawaiian,  and  Welsh,  among  many  others.  There  are  links  between  language shift/maintenance and socioeconomic and political inequality, physical and mental 362

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well-being, and political and cultural subjugation; language becomes a source of identity, pride, and empowerment to overcome historical trauma from colonialism and social, political, and cultural oppression of minorities (Roche 2022). This chapter discusses language documentation, showing how linguists can support communities in reclaiming and reappropriating linguistic heritage. Since the 1990s the rhetoric and public discussion around this topic has been dominated by notions of ‘language death’, ‘loss’, ‘destruction’, and ‘linguicide’, often with a sense of inevitability. Paradoxically, despite the rhetoric, the number of languages listed by Ethnologue is actually increasing: up from 7,099 in 2017 and from 6,000 estimated by Krauss (1992), of which he calculated that 90% were likely to be no longer in use by 2100 if trends continued. This will be discussed further here. In addition to counting, linguists have also sought to measure the endangerment level or viability of individual languages. Thus, UNESCO (2003) proposed a language vitality scale (strong → threatened → endangered → moribund → extinct), based on nine factors: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Use in the family (intergenerational transmission) Absolute number of speakers Proportion of speakers within the total population Shifts in domains of language use Response to new domains and media Materials for language education and literacy Governmental and institutional language attitudes and policies, including official status and use Community members’ attitudes towards their own language Type and quality of documentation.

Despite the apparent comprehensiveness of this scale, there is little guidance on how to measure the factors or how to weigh each component against others, so intergenerational transmission remains the most widely used gauge of language vitality. Cessation of intergenerational transmission is commonly cited as a cause of language shift, but it is actually part of the process. It should also be noted that until Ethnologue adopted an alternative scale proposed by Lewis and Simons (2010), language endangerment measures generally pointed downwards, with no account taken of efforts to revitalize languages; this led to complaints to UNESCO by communities whose languages were categorized as ‘extinct’ (see Section ‘Discourses of endangerment’). The number of languages counted has increased due to new and better data collection and increased recognition of languages previously ‘unknown to science’ or grouped as ‘dialects’ of a single language. Sign languages are now recognized, including ‘village sign languages’ used in small communities, rightly accepted as equally valid as spoken ones; many are endangered, often through shift to larger urban or national sign languages. The majority of the world’s population is multilingual, and multilinguals utilize different elements of their linguistic repertoire at will, not necessarily differentiating between named languages (Luepke and Storch 2013; García and Li 2014). Linguistic differentiation is nevertheless important for identity construction by groups and individuals, and reclaiming language(s) is a key part of rectifying ongoing injustices. Who counts as a speaker, and how good (or ‘fluent’) do you have to be? Measures of language vitality are silent on this. Most of the world’s languages remain under-described, so there are very few proficiency tests for minority and endangered languages or ways to identify who 363

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counts as a ‘native speaker’. For many, ‘mother tongue’ does not necessarily mean ‘first language’ or ‘regularly used language’ but rather the ancestral or heritage language. People who grew up speaking a minority language may have lost fluency due to education policies, societal or economic pressures, and discriminatory attitudes. Where intergenerational transmission has been broken, first language speakers may be very old, with middle-aged or younger people likely to be ‘semi’ or latent speakers (who heard the language when young but do not have productive fluency) or second language or ‘new’ speakers. These new speakers, who may also be core language revitalization advocates, are often not counted as legitimate speakers by others or by linguists. In the 1980s, linguists explored structural and functional changes due to contraction of the speaker base, using terms like ‘language attrition’. Dorian (1989) identified ‘stylistic shrinkage’ as an early change: speakers are unable to produce a wide range of genres and are restricted to elementary conversational exchange or invariant simple sentences. This has structural consequences on sentence organization (syntax), word formation (morphology) and pronunciation, including loss of distinctive sounds not found in the dominant languages (Palosaari and Campbell 2011). Sociolinguists also researched language shift, with Fishman (1991) influential in identifying non-linguistic factors, and how attention to them could assist with ‘reversing’ language shift. Mainstream linguistics became interested in the early 1990s, especially because of Hale et al. (1992) and Robins and Uhlenbeck (1991). The Comité International Permanent des Linguistes (CIPL) promoted international discussion in arenas such as UNESCO, which compiled its nine-factor vitality scale. Popular accounts appeared, such as Crystal (2000), Abley (2003) and Dalby (2003). Funding for fieldwork and documentation of endangered languages became available from Foundation for Endangered Languages (founded 1996), Endangered Language Fund (founded 1997), Volkswagen Foundation (Dokumentation der bedrohte Sprachen [DOBES] programme, founded 2000), and Arcadia Fund (ELDP, founded 2002). DOBES also established a digital language archive, as did Arcadia (ELAR). The US National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities established the Documenting Endangered Languages (DEL) programme. All the large funder initiatives limited projects to documentation and description of highly endangered languages (i.e. excluding those which are considered to be merely ‘threatened’) and disallowed applied work, including language revitalization. The early 21st century saw the establishment of specialist training courses in language documentation and revitalization at academic institutions, such as SOAS, University of London, and University of Hawai‘i, and an increase in related modules, such as field methods, in many general linguistics departments.2 Fieldwork and documentation training became a regular part of summer schools or training institutes. For overviews of specific developments in the past 25 years, see Austin (2016) and Seifart et al. (2018); in the next Section we present critical reflections on some of the methodological approaches and outcomes which evolved over this period.

Critical issues and topics Discourses of endangerment As mentioned, until relatively recently, rhetoric about endangered languages focused on loss, decline, and negative consequences. Linguists commonly refer to languages as ‘dead’, ‘extinct’, ‘obsolescent’, or ‘moribund’; and use terms like ‘semi’, ‘partial’, or ‘passive’ to 364

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describe speakers (Cameron 2007; Duchêne and Heller 2007). For example, Crystal (2000) takes a somewhat fatalistic view: To say that a language is dead is like saying that a person is dead. . . . If you are the last speaker of a language, your language – viewed as a tool of communication – is already dead. (Crystal 2000: 1–2) Many speakers and supporters of endangered languages dislike this rhetoric of finality, especially given the relative success of efforts to ‘revive’ so-called ‘dead’ and highly moribund languages in recent years: such as Cornish and Manx in the British Isles; Miami, Mohegan, and Mutsun in the USA; and Kaurna and Gamilaraay in Australia. Some feel that using the term language death may in itself have a causative effect, hastening a language’s demise by encouraging pessimism, or denying funding because the language is ‘too far gone’. Others object to such casually derogatory terminology. Even the term endangered may be seen as negative: for example, in the Isle of Man, Manx (whose last traditional native speaker died in 1974) is consciously promoted as a living language. Less objectionable is describing a language as ‘sleeping’ or ‘archived’, or ‘which does not have any speakers at present’, and describing speakers as ‘latent’ (see Section ‘Previous research’). This affirms that the process is reversible and that community members have agency. Endangered languages were highlighted internationally by the 2019 International Year of Indigenous Languages declared by UNESCO, where the focus shifted to ‘development, peace building and reconciliation’.3 The rhetoric of the International Decade of Indigenous Languages (IDIL 2022–2032)4 is in terms of ‘Indigenous language users’ human rights’, ‘empowerment of Indigenous language users’, and ‘making a decade of action for indigenous languages’. This is much more positive and forward-looking, aimed at overcoming past injustices and discrimination, and places Indigenous people and their voices at the centre of concern.

Hegemony Terminology and discourses are important because they play a role in causing ideologies of deficit to be naturalized by minorities: what Gramsci (1971) termed hegemony. Negative attitudes towards minority language varieties are held not only by majority language speakers but are also assimilated by speakers of minority languages themselves; they lead to ‘linguistic insecurity’ and unwillingness to speak minority languages. Labov (1966: 489) claimed that ‘the term “linguistic self-hatred” may not be too extreme’. Ting (2021) uses a critical discourse framework to look at how dominant government discourses have influenced Indigenous people’s perception of their languages and suggests that it can resemble Stockholm-syndrome-like behaviour. So parents might ‘choose’ to speak a ‘more useful’ language with their children, when actually their choice is not free but is influenced by dominant discourses, such as denial of multilingualism. Although the majority of the world’s population has a repertoire of languages at their disposal for different purposes, prevailing discourses insist that in order to speak a dominant language properly, the home language has to be abandoned.

Ideologies Ideologies are socioculturally shared belief systems, which are often unconscious (Van Dijk 2013: 177). They ‘are largely acquired, expressed, and reproduced by discourse, and that hence 365

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a discourse analytical approach is crucial to understand the ways ideologies emerge, spread, and are used by social groups’ (Van Dijk 2013: 176). Silverstein (1976, 2001) coined the term ‘metapragmatics’ to refer to ‘talk about talk, the socially constructed ways of expressing the meaning of talk’ which can make ideologies visible, through metaphors, idioms, behavioural rules, and judgements, for example, and even code choice itself. The last of these can be iconic of ideological stances towards particular ways of speaking (e.g. a child refusing to reply in their parent’s language but responding in the dominant language a community is shifting towards). Vernacular language ideologies have been broadly defined as tacit or explicit ideas and beliefs that members of a speech community have with respect to their linguistic repertoire (Woolard and Schieffelin 1994). There is frequently a disjuncture between the beliefs of members of speech communities and the ideologies of linguists, institutions, and governments (whose language policies are frequently ideologically driven). As we note in Austin and Sallabank (2014: 1), ‘This book [or chapter] would not have been written without the ideological shift over the last 10–30 years towards broadly positive attitudes in favour of “saving” endangered languages.’ What ‘saving’ means, however, is open to interpretation and often to misunderstandings (see the next sections).

Essentialism Much of the discourse on endangered languages is essentialist and deterministic. The strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis argues that our way of thinking, and thus our cultural identity, are determined by the lexicon and syntax of our language. A corollary claim is that when a language dies, a unique way of looking at the world also disappears and that loss of a language means extinction of a unique creation of human beings that houses a treasure of information and preserves a people’s identity (Grimes 2001). Seifart et al. (2018: e336) are even more encompassing: [W]e lose the traditional knowledge of an ethnic group, much of it bound up in language: knowledge of food and water resources and local agricultural practices, ways of managing ecologies for sustainability, kinship and social systems that embody variants of how to live together to mutual benefit, how to rear self-confident and happy children (Diamond 2012), visions of humans’ place in nature, and so much else, both material and spiritual. This kind of deterministic essentialism denies that socioculturally acquired knowledge can be passed on even when languages are not, or when they change their form intergenerationally. It presents a constricted view of the flexibility and dynamics of human creativity. Language and culture are closely linked, although not necessarily in a deterministic way. Kroskrity (2000: 13) observes that ‘even dominant ideologies are dynamically responsive to ever-changing forms of oppositions’, such as moves from ‘generic he’ to ‘he or she’ and then to ‘they’. Investigating metapragmatics and discourses about language attitudes, structures, functions, and uses, and thereby uncovering ideologies, is therefore a key step in addressing language endangerment, especially in support of campaigns for empowerment and recognition of linguistic human rights. Academics are also influenced by their own ideologies, by the research community’s own discourses and by fashion in theories, valuation, and ranking. Thus, Dobrin et al. (2009: 41) point out that the audit culture which dominates Western society, including academia, leads to commodification and ‘reduction of languages to common exchange values . . . , particularly in competitive and programmatic contexts such as grant-seeking and standard-setting 366

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where languages are necessarily compared and ranked’. Speaker numbers (from Ethnologue) and vitality ranking (from UNESCO) feed into this transformation of socioculturally dynamic ways of speaking into objects and numbers. Commoditizing forces have also impacted how linguists see their relationships to the individuals and communities with whom they work, with moral or professional obligations to ‘give back’ being expressed as transacted objects, such as dictionaries, subtitled videos, primers, or mobile apps, ‘rather than through knowledge sharing, joint engagement in language maintenance activities, or other kinds of interactionally defined achievements’ (Dobrin et al. 2009: 43). A consequence of objectification can be double endangerment, such as the endangerment of the language along with endangerment of the materials once collected to document and/or support it. Speaker community views can also be essentialist. Sallabank (2013) found that community members tend to express strong overt associations between language and identity, often accompanied by purism and hyper-valorization of the ‘ancestral code’ (Childs et al. 2014), the imagined form of the language before shift began. The adaptive value of code-mixing and code-switching, let alone borrowing of lexicon, especially for newly introduced technologies or objects, is negated,5 and linguists and speakers seek ‘pure’ or ‘original’ expressions that separate out codes into differentiated describable ideals.

Typologies Typologies of language vitality may fail to take account of power relationships and ideologies, conflict situations, the effects of language planning activities, or changing relationships between languages or in emerging attitudes. Indeed, Schiffman (2002: 141) claims that typologies are theoretically ‘passé’ and ‘guilty of the latter-day sin of essentialism’. Documentation of endangered languages has also in large part been driven by a desire to establish structural and functional typologies by cross-language comparison, giving rise to calls for standardization,6 both in representations and in content. Thus, interlinear glossing (the annotation of word morphological structure requiring alignment of language segments and glosses, typically in a dominant academic language) is seen as the gold standard, blinding researchers to alternative representations and the inherent demands of interpretational literacy that such glossing requires. To some extent the dominance of a few software tools, such as ELAN for transcription and annotation7 and FLEx for glossing and dictionary-making,8 has led to homogeneity in analyses and representations that obscure linguistic diversity.

Relationship of documentation and revitalization The forced imposition of a colonial and/or national language and assimilation to a majority culture has resulted in many people feeling a loss of self-worth and pride. These practices have left deep and painful scars, often taking the form of multi-generational historical traumatization. Too often, linguists have taken language data from communities without even acknowledging their contribution to the scholarship, let alone making the research results accessible in terms that the participants can understand, challenge, or use. Thus, there are barriers for access to the terabytes of recordings and linguistic analysis stored in digital archives now (see Section ‘Transdisciplinarity’). It is therefore essential for non-community researchers to be culturally sensitive and to attempt to rectify exploitative practices rather than prolonging them. Austin and Sallabank (2018) argue that the relationship between documentation and revitalization is fraught, with the outcomes of documentation stored in archives frequently being not useful for the creation of language support materials (inappropriate topics or genres, 367

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difficult-to-hear recordings, lack of learner-directed or child-directed speech samples, lack of interactional language for learners to scaffold) and in formats that are impossible to use without technical training and fluency in the researcher’s language. In addition, language practices evidenced by the archived corpus may not match the perceptions or preferences of speakers and language activists, who may prefer purism and the ancestral code for learning materials. Sugita (2007) and Amery (2009) have argued that to support language revitalization, documentary corpora must include a variety of interactions, identity and relationship work, colloquialisms, swear words and idiomatic expressions, intimate language, and commonly occurring speech formulas, proverbs, and sayings, all of which applied linguists know are a shortcut to fluency and ‘nativelike’ usage. In addition, especially useful for learning are conversations about everyday life, particularly in non-traditional contexts like shopping, medical centres, or sporting events. Samples are also needed of intergenerational interaction, including code-switching, and the language practices of younger generations. Austin and Sallabank (2018) also argue that documentation of revitalization can also be a means to enhance meta-discussion of learning outcomes, curriculum and materials review, evaluation, and support for language programmes; as Nathan and Fang (2009) point out, language classes can provide a locus for uncovering children’s language attitudes, paths of acquisition, developmental stages, literacy, and new types of language use.

Main research methods The data collection methods commonly used in fieldwork involve elicitation of decontextualized key words and structures intended to facilitate inter-language comparability (see Section ‘Typologies’); standardized questionnaires or experimental tools,9 and grammaticality judgements. This may be supplemented by narratives, songs, and rituals (not infrequently monologic retellings divorced from their socio-cultural context); conversations tend to be avoided because transcribing and annotating them is difficult and time consuming. The recording agenda is usually set by the linguist. Observation can capture language practices in context, while elicitation and self-report capture how people think they speak (i.e. perceptions and beliefs about language). Grammaticality judgements reflect how people think they or others should speak (i.e. language ideologies). Elicitation often results in formal, ‘correct’, citation forms, skewed towards an idealized ancestral code (or in a diglossic context, a ‘high’ language). It has been argued that linguists should document language ecologies, not just individual languages or varieties (e.g. Mühlhäusler 2000; Grenoble 2011), with proper attention paid to multilingual repertoires, mixed codes, translanguaging, contact effects, and language variation and change. Ethnographicallyinformed participant observation and recording of natural(istic) interactions is the only way to capture the full range of language use, how people employ language to establish and maintain social relationships, and the social meanings of different ways of speaking and signing (Dobrin and Schwartz 2016). An ethnographic understanding of a given community is a prerequisite to culturally sensitive language planning and maintenance activities (Childs et al. 2014: 171; see also Section ‘Relationship of documentation and revitalization’).

Future directions of practices Diversity and the particular Researchers and communities seeking to document and describe endangered languages need to adopt a diverse array of data collection and analysis techniques, incorporating 368

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participant observation, and reducing reliance on ‘standard’ questionnaires, experimental protocols, and ready-to-hand tools. This means focusing instead on the particularities and uniqueness of given endangered languages contexts (or ecologies) and involving true collaboration with community members. In the period from around 2000 to 2015, funders and documenters aimed at wide but thin sampling to create corpora that could result in grammars, dictionaries, and text collections (often presented as a revival of the ‘Boasian trilogy’ [Woodbury 2011]). More recently, there is a focus on particular domains of language use (especially endangered cultural practices, such as ritual speech or interactions in now infrequently occurring contexts); multimodality (e.g. ‘whistled speech’ or ‘drum language’), which varies widely between communities; and inter-speaker variation, drawing on concepts and techniques from variationist sociolinguistics. The consequences are richer, more specific, and more varied accounts of endangered languages and communities, less subject to being typologized and more concerned with representing what is special and unique about particular contexts. The dominant ideology among researchers until recently has also been that ‘real’ language and cultural documentation must take place in isolated, distant, difficult to get to, and often dangerous locations, away from the influences of dominant communities, where ‘true’ knowledge would be preserved. Diaspora communities, even those where languages and traditions are strongly maintained, were excluded as possible sites for research. However, projects like the Endangered Language Alliance10 in New York City have demonstrated how much can be done with immigrant and diaspora speakers, singers, and signers. As travel became impossible in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers evolved innovative ways to work ‘at a distance’, using technological developments, such as collaboration software, and shifting data collection and analysis towards speakers and local experts, including language activists. This adaptive and collaborative approach is likely to persist in some form well into the future.

Transdisciplinarity Language documentation has tended to be done by linguists only, and often by individuals, perhaps with locally employed and trained research assistants who speak the endangered language. There have been exceptions which involve cross-disciplinary collaborations, such as Pande and Abbi (2011) on Andamanese languages and birds; the value of transdisciplinary collaboration was clear from workshops run by the SOAS-based Plants, Animals, and Words project that brought together biologists, ornithologists, botanists, and linguists for cross-fertilization of data collection and analysis techniques and outcomes.11 Such collaborations are demanding and involve learning about the methods and metalanguage of all participants, but the results of multifaceted collaborations for documentation of ethnobiological knowledge in particular can be impressive.

Community empowerment and decolonization As mentioned in Section ‘Relationship of documentation and revitalization’, endangered language communities have often experienced research as exploitative. Recently there has been an ‘Indigenous efflorescence’ (Roche et al. 2018), with community members demanding equitable research partnerships. There is growing interest in many communities in traditional knowledge and Indigenous paradigms of knowing, which may clash with Western scientific models which seek to quantify measurable entities and results. However, it is important not to 369

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make essentialist assumptions about ‘what communities want’, nor to assume that there is one ‘Indigenous knowledge paradigm’. There has been a progression of approaches towards linguistic fieldwork since the 1990s (Grinevald 2003; Cameron et al. 1992): from research on a language to research for and with the language community, which recognized the need for collaboration and reciprocity (Czaykowska-Higgins 2009; Rice 2006, 2009, 2011). Grinevald (2003) and Leonard and Haynes (2010) proposed a further stage, where projects are community-driven, and the role of a linguist researcher is to train and mentor local researchers and to produce outputs requested by the community, who are also in charge of publishing policy. Nevertheless, the researcher-centred approach is still the predominant model for many funding bodies. Dobrin and Schwartz (2016: 255) argue for a more nuanced exploration of ‘complexity and diversity of what goes on in particular researcher-community relationships’. One major problem to be confronted is that most of the larger digital archives of endangered languages, which now store terabytes of audio, video, and text recordings, plus linguistic analysis for some of them, are inaccessible to anyone who does not know English (or, in the case of AILLA,12 Spanish, and for Pangloss,13 French – all ex-colonial languages). This is because the archive interfaces and virtually all of their metadata (descriptions of what the deposits contain) are in English, so locating information and accessing and understanding it are restricted. Metadata also focuses on the standard categorizations set up by researchers (via the OLAC14 and CIMDI15 specifications) to enable sharing between archives and individuals rather than descriptions that make sense to speakers and communities. The Mukurtu Project16 aims to respond to these roadblocks to access and use, and to ‘empower communities to manage, share, narrate, and exchange their digital heritage in culturally relevant and ethically-minded ways’, but its impact has not yet been widely felt. Another problem with current archives is that stored files are in formats which require knowledge and training in specialist software for access, and the software interfaces are typically restricted to English or other ex-colonial languages. Researchers rarely convert their materials into formats like PDF or plain text that anyone can read. Recently, some have begun to explore monolingual language documentation and revitalization, studying endangered languages in the languages themselves, rather than the dominant, typically colonial tongues. This involves the creation of new genres and metalanguage (e.g. McDougall 2019 describes work in Luqa from the Solomon Islands). The University of the South Pacific offers a module for MA students to research their own languages and to write term papers in the language or the local lingua franca (e.g. Bislama for Vanuatu students). In 2020, the journal Language Documentation and Description began publishing abstracts of papers in Indigenous languages and lingua francas, along with English, and in 2021, the first paper with a section in an Indigenous language appeared (Harvey 2021 in Kala Kawaw Ya). In future, we may see more of this kind of research and publication, shifting the status relationship in research and academic discourse away from colonializing languages to the endangered languages themselves.

Related topics minority/Indigenous language revitalization; language learning; language education; corpus linguistics; sociolinguistics for language education; multilingualism; ecology of language; language policy and planning; family language policy; critical discourse analysis; identity; language and politics; sign languages; language attrition; language and ageing; linguistic ethnography; linguistic anthropology; linguistic landscape 370

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Notes 1 www.ethnologue.com/guides/, accessed 2021-06-21 2 Fieldwork-based language documentation and description, along with sociolinguistic study of shift and revitalization, has been established in mainstream linguistics in Australia and New Zealand since the 1970s. 3 https://en.iyil2019.org/. accessed 2021-07-02 4 https://en.unesco.org/news/upcoming-decade-indigenous-languages-2022-2032-focus-indigenous-language-users-human-rights, accessed 2021-07-02 5 Despite it being common in larger dominant languages, like English. 6 Such as the ‘Leipzig Glossing Rules’ (https://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/resources/glossing-rules.php) or GOLD generalized ontology (http://linguistics-ontology.org/info/about), both accessed 2021-07-10 7 https://archive.mpi.nl/tla/elan, accessed 2021-07-02 8 https://software.sil.org/fieldworks/, accessed 2021-07-02 9 See the diverse range of such tools at www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/tools-at-lingboard/questionnaires. php, accessed 2021-07-01 10 https://elalliance.org/, accessed 2021-07-01 11 www.soas.ac.uk/linguistics/events/plants-animals-words/, accessed 2021-07-02 12 https://ailla.utexas.org/, accessed 2021-07-01 13 https://pangloss.cnrs.fr/, accessed 2021-07-01 14 www.language-archives.org/OLAC/metadata.html, accessed 2021-07-01 15 www.clarin.eu/content/component-metadata, accessed 2021-07-01 16 https://mukurtu.org/about/, accessed 2021-07-01

Further reading Austin, P. K. and Sallabank, J. (eds,) (2011) The Cambridge Handbook of Endangered Languages, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (This introduces language endangerment from the perspectives of language ecology, speakers and communities, contact and change, and society and culture. It includes the essentials of language documentation and archiving, as well as hands-on views of advocacy and support, development of writing systems for previously unwritten languages, education, training the next generation of researchers and activists, dictionary-making, language policy, economic aspects, and applying technology and new media in support of endangered languages.) Bradley, D. and Bradley, M. (2019) Language Endangerment, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (This introduces endangerment as an academic field of study, exploring the causes of language shift and the different pathways observed in communities. The approach is interdisciplinary and covers linguistic, social, and other factors that contribute to shift. Examples are drawn from the authors’ research in Asia and elsewhere.) Leonard, W. Y. and De Korne, H. (eds.) (2017) Language Documentation and Description, 14. Special Issue on Reclaiming Languages. London: EL Publishing. https://lddjournal.org/issue/15 (This examines language reclamation strategies to counter forms of marginalization of minority language speakers and communities. The focus is on grassroots responses to the pressures and opportunities of specific contexts, aiming to shift power imbalances. The volume critically examines revitalization and associated discourses and the roles of researchers and communities and their actions from a social justice perspective.) Thomason, S. (2015) Endangered Languages: An Introduction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (This is an introductory overview covering causes and processes of endangerment and the consequences and outcomes for communities and academic research. It describes documentation and revitalization methods, illustrated with case studies, some drawn from the author’s own long-term work with the Montana Salish community.)

References Abley, M. (2003) Spoken Here: Travels among Threatened Languages, London: Heinemann. Amery, R. (2009) ‘Phoenix or relic? Documentation of languages with revitalization in mind’, Language Documentation & Conservation, 3(2): 138–148. 371

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Austin,  P.  K.  (2016)  ‘Language  documentation  20  years  on’,  in  M.  Pütz  and  L.  Filipović  (eds.),  Endangered Languages and Languages in Danger: Issues of Ecology, Policy and Human Rights, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 147–170. Austin, P. K. and Sallabank, J. (eds.) (2014) Endangered Languages: Beliefs and Ideologies in Language Documentation and Revitalisation, London: British Academy. Austin, P. K. and Sallabank, J. (2018) ‘Language documentation and language revitalisation: Some methodological considerations’, in L. Hinton, L. Huss and G. Roche (eds.), Handbook of Language Revitalisation, London: Routledge, pp. 207–215. Cameron, D. (2007) ‘Language endangerment and verbal hygiene: History, morality and politics’, in A. Duchêne and M. Heller (eds.), Discourses of Endangerment, London: Continuum Press, pp. 268–285. Cameron, D., Frazer, E., Harvey, P., Rampton, M. B. H. and Richardson, K. (1992) Researching Language: Issues of Power and Method, London: Routledge. Childs, T., Good, J. and Mitchell, A. (2014) ‘Beyond the ancestral code: Towards a model for sociolinguistic language documentation’. Language Documentation & Conservation, 8: 168–191. Crystal, D. (2000) Language Death, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Czaykowska-Higgins, E. (2009) ‘Research models, community engagement, and linguistic fieldwork: Reflections on working within Canadian indigenous communities’, Language Documentation and Conservation, 3(1): 15–50. Dalby, A. (2003) Language in Danger: The Loss of Linguistic Diversity and the Threat to Our Future, New York: Columbia University Press. Diamond, J. (2012) The World until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?, New York: Viking. Dobrin, L., Austin, P. K. and Nathan, D. (2009) ‘Dying to be counted: The commodification of endangered languages in language documentation’, Language Documentation and Description, 6: 37–52. Dobrin, L. and Schwartz, S. (2016) ‘Collaboration or participant observation? Rethinking models of “linguistic social work”’, Language Documentation & Conservation, 10: 253–277. Dorian, N. C. (ed.) (1989) Investigating Obsolescence: Studies in Language Contraction and Death, Studies in the Social and Cultural Foundations of Language 7, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Duchêne, A. and Heller, M. (eds.) (2007) Discourses of Endangerment, London: Continuum Press, pp. 268–285. Fishman, J. A. (1991) Reversing Language Shift: Theoretical and Empirical Foundations of Assistance to Threatened Languages, Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. García, O. and Li, W. (2014) Translanguaging: Language, Bilingualism and Education, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Gramsci, A. (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, New York: International Publishers. Grenoble, L. (2011) ‘Language ecology and endangerment’, in P. K. Austin and J. Sallabank (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Endangered Languages, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 27–44. Grimes, B. F. (2001) ‘Global language viability: Causes, symptoms and cures for endangered languages’, Notes on Linguistics, 4: 205–223. Grinevald, C. (2003) ‘Speakers and documentation of endangered languages’, Language Documentation and Description, 1: 52–72. Hale, K., Krauss, M., Watahomigie, L. J., Yamamoto, A. Y., Craig, C., Masayesva Jeanne, L. and England, N. C. (1992) ‘Endangered languages’, Language, 68(1): 1–42. Harvey, A. (2021) ‘Kalaw Kawaw Ya (Saibai Island, Western Torres Strait Islands, Australia): Language snapshot’, Language Documentation and Description, 20: 75–85. Krauss, M. (1992) ‘The world’s languages in crisis’, Language, 68(1): 4–10. Kroskrity, P. V. (ed.) (2000) Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities, and Identities, Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press. Labov, W. (1966) The Social Stratification of English in New York City, Washington, DC: Centre for Applied Linguistics. Leonard, W. Y. and Haynes, E. (2010) ‘Making “collaboration” collaborative: An examination of perspectives that frame linguistic field research’, Language Documentation & Conservation, 4: 269–293. Lewis, M. P. I. and Simons, G. F. (2010) ‘Assessing endangerment: Expanding Fishman’s GIDS’, Revue Roumaine de Linguistique, 55(2): 103–120. 372

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Luepke, F. and Storch, A. (2013) Repertoires and Choices in African Languages, Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. McDougall, D. (2019) ‘Reviving the spirit of vernacular languages in Solomon Islands’. Blog post, University of Melbourne. http://hdl.handle.net/11343/233969 Mühlhäusler, P. (2000) ‘Language planning and language ecology’, Current Issues in Language Planning, 1(3): 306–367. Nathan, D. and Fang, M. (2009) ‘Language documentation and pedagogy for endangered languages: A mutual revitalisation’, Language Documentation and Description, 6: 132–160. Palosaari, N. and Campbell, L. (2011) ‘Structural aspects of language endangerment’, In P. K. Austin and J. Sallabank (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Endangered Languages, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 100–119. Pande, S. and Abbi, A. (2011) Birds of the Great Andamanese, Delhi: Oxford University Press. Rice, K. (2006) ‘Ethical issues in linguistic fieldwork: An overview’, Journal of Academic Ethics, 4(1–4): 123–155. Rice, K. (2009) ‘Must there be two solitudes? Language activists and linguists working together’, in J. Reyhner and L. Lockhard (eds.), Indigenous Language Revitalization: Encouragement, Guidance, and Lessons Learned, Flagstaff: Northern Arizona University, pp. 30–52. Rice, K. (2011) ‘Documentary linguistics and community relations’, Language Documentation and Conservation, 5: 187–202. Robins, R. H. and Uhlenbeck, E. M. (eds.) (1991) Endangered Languages, New York: Berg Publishers. Roche, G. (2022) ‘The world’s languages in crisis (Redux): Transforming global linguistic injustice’, Emancipations: A Journal of Critical Social Analysis, 1(2): article 8. Roche, G., Maruyama, H. and Kroik, A. V. (eds.) (2018) Indigenous Efflorescence: Beyond Revitalisation in Sapmi and Ainu Mosir, Canberra: ANU Press. Sallabank, J. (2013) Attitudes to Endangered Languages: Identities and Policies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schiffman, H. (2002) Linguistic Culture and Language Policy, London: Routledge. Seifart, F., Evans, N., Hammarstrom, H. and Levinson, S. C. (eds.) (2018) ‘Language documentation twenty-five years on’, Language, 94(4): e324–e345. Silverstein, M. (1976) ‘Shifters, linguistic categories, and cultural description’, in K. Basso and H. A. Selby (eds.), Meaning in Anthropology, Albuquerque: UNM Press, pp. 11–55. Silverstein, M. (2001) ‘The limits of awareness’, in A. Duranti (ed.), Linguistic Anthropology: A Reader, Malden: Blackwell, pp. 382–401. Sugita, Y. (2007) ‘Language revitalization or language fossilization? Some suggestions for language documentation from the viewpoint of interactional linguistics’, in P. K. Austin, O. Bond and D. Nathan (eds.), Proceedings of First Conference on Language Documentation and Linguistic Theory, London: SOAS, pp. 243–250. Ting, C.-J. (2021) ‘A case of linguistic Stockholm Syndrome: A critical discourse study of Indigenous language revitalisation in Taiwan’, Paper presented at the 27th Annual Stabilizing Indigenous Languages Symposium, hosted by Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, Canada, 14–18 June. UNESCO (2003) ‘Language vitality and endangerment’, Document submitted to the International Expert Meeting on UNESCO Programme Safeguarding of Endangered Languages, Paris, 10–12 March. Van Dijk, T. A. 2013. ‘Ideology and discourse’, in M. Freeden and M. Stears (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 175–196. Woodbury, A. C. (2011) ‘Language documentation’, in P. K. Austin and J. Sallabank (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Endangered Languages, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 159–186. Woolard, K. A. and Schieffelin, B. B. (1994) ‘Language ideology’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 23: 55–82.

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29 Ecolinguistics in practice Stephen Cowley

A mathematician confided That a Mobius band is one-sided, And you’ll get quite a laugh, If you cut one in half, For it stays in one piece when divided.

Introduction Ecolinguists view ecological destruction as an oppressive force. In practice, the field unites work opposing classism (Freire 2000 [1970]) with challenges to how an ideology of growthism drives waste and consumption (Halliday 1990). However, in bringing the challenge to education, the ecolinguist treats language, social practices, and human agency as akin to a Möbius loop. As Raimondi (2019) suggests, not only do parts loop together but, in cutting them apart, they give rise to new wholes. Although the ecolinguist treats languaging (or translanguaging) as part of agency, as cut into sayings and doings, the results can alter practical action (Li 2018). One can attend to how persons and groups self-construct by linking practices, verbal patterns, ways of attending, and, at once, use the results to manage and assess understanding. While human communication has a role, whole body concerting unites the verbal with what is thought, perceived, and implied. Languaging links bodies, materials, and institutions (e.g. banks, languages, procedures) with knowing, attitudes, and beliefs. Even if nothing is said, things come with meanings attached or, as Gahrn-Andersen (2021) notes, enlanguaged cognition permeates human experience. Shapiro (2011: 1) opens an important book about life by declaring that ‘innovation, not selection, is the critical issue in evolutionary change’. Cells self-modify and set off heritable effects: just as organisms change, so do ecosystems, lineages, species, persons, and cultures. In chimpanzees, individuals learn from what a group knows about, say, termite fishing (Lonsdorf 2006). In humans, enlanguaged cognition channels experience and thus individual lives. Like chimpanzees, we rely on simplex tricks such as inhibition and vicariance (Berthoz 2012) – humans inhibit by staying silent, and as we listen, we use vicariance to adapt as we talk, think, act, and choose what to say. Practices rely on what Pennycook (2020) calls semiotic 374

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assemblages that bundle together, say, group-based beliefs, working memory, and dispositions with a person’s skills and expectations. Assemblages bind languaging with artefacts and skills and, thus, serve praxis. As a cultural tool, languaging channels epistemic change.

History Whereas the Greeks sought commonalities in mind and nature and the scholastics turned to signs, modernism reduces intelligence to form and function. Sixty-five years ago, a mechanistic view of linguistic novelty (Chomsky 1957) was greeted with acclaim. Yet since reason, computation, and grammar produce no novelty, today’s emphasis falls on embodiment, spontaneity, and natural innovation. In an extended ecology (Steffensen 2013), humans use the loops of languaging, agency, and practices. Life acts as its own designer (Markoš et al. 2009) as people use practices to change the ecology. As first defined, the ecology consists in ‘interrelations between organisms and their living and non-living surroundings’ (Haeckel 1866: 286; cited in Fill 2017: 1). Since languaging arises just such interrelations, it reduces to neither mappings nor linguistic structure. In the Ecology of Language, Haugen (1972) attributes the surplus to ‘interactions’ between languages and environments (for critique, see Cowley 2021). The idea inspired many to use linguistic analysis to transformatory ends. Faced by climate catastrophe, proposals for social renewal include critique of Baconian science (Finke 2019), the use of discourse analysis (Alexander 2017), or exhortations to live by new stories (Stibbe 2015). In the last 50 years, Haugen’s metaphorical view of the ecology (e.g. Fill 2001; Pennycook 2004) has been largely superseded. Today, most focus on life sustaining relations between living beings. Ecolinguists can ask how natural innovation contributes to the looping of languaging, agency and practice. In the ecosphere things happen somewhere: living systems are consortia of organisms or bioecologies (Clements and Shelford 1939). Hence, human practices bind unrepeatable experience into culture, identities, and histories. In enlanguaged worlds, wordings re-evoke the already lived as events that use emplacement (see Barron et al. (2020). The non-localized shapes nonce events that arise as a person binds verbal patterns together with signs of culture, developmental history, and how a lineage constrains changes in a phenotype changes. From a god’s eye view, interactions amalgamate experiential and causal experience. As bioecological beings (Cowley 2014a), humans – and only humans – use practices to connect place, perception, action, and languaging. Thus, emplacement brings epistemic value to voices, feeling, looking, and above all, doing. Across settings, parties actualize practices whose outcomes have variable effects on others, their doings, and in wider scales, the ecosphere. Twentieth-century ecolinguistics linked the ecology of language (e.g. Mühlhäusler 2000) to critique of social and ecological discourses (see Alexander 2017). By the turn of the millennium, the social context was seen as an ‘ecology’ that affects practices and identity (e.g. Leather and Van Dam 2003). One group of applied linguists tried to close a ‘gap’ between fields of language acquisition and language socialization (Kramsch and Steffensen 2008). In Van Lier’s (2004) work, appeal to the ecology brought social and material resources to the attention of applied linguists. Classrooms became places where sociocultural and semiotic means brought Gibson’s (2015 [1979]) affordances to actions, skills, and learning. Formerly dominant linguistic and cognitive models gave way to the view that, somehow, linguistic knowing uses ‘socialization’ (Douglas Fir Group 2016). Computer games, for example, act as distributed systems where skills and language co-develop: media can favour values realizing and, thus, human becoming (Zheng et al. 2018). In cognitive-social meshworks, people link artefacts, dynamics, and how language and cognition are distributed (Blair and Cowley 2003; Thibault 2011; Hellerman and 375

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Thorne 2020). Emplacement allows persons to connect practices and artefacts as they align perceiving (Hutchins 2014). In such a world, a history of coupling social dynamics with material entities enables self-constructing. Far from needing to learn, acquire, construct, internalize, embody, or use ‘language’, learners use whole body activity to concert action, perceiving and languaging. As organizationally open systems, persons use place to display and speak as they routinely understand more than is said. Languaging has epistemic effects that enable people to cooperate, coordinate, and of course, compete. Before pursuing how such powers arise, I stress that emplacement is much richer than ‘social context’. As ecological contact, languaging is part of living. Without such a view, as Pennycook (2004: 222) warns, there are political dangers; even if ‘singing the song of diversity and the environment’, ecolinguists may unwittingly echo the ‘discourses of the natural that have long served the dominant culture of the world’. When ecolinguists turn to the actual ecology, Steffensen and Kramsch (2017: 12) argue, they challenge the ‘epistemic categories we use to construct our object of inquiry’. Hence, linguistic constructs (e.g. utterance, language use, text, discourse, conversation) are seen to lack causal powers. Models of language systems, parts and modes of operation are wholly descriptive. Bioecologies are affected by language only when humans actualize practices (that may also use, say, machines, money, and institutions). Rejecting mentalism, cognition is traced to a history of environment-agent dynamics (Chemero 2011; Steffensen and Cowley 2021), what people do, and thus, how happenings unfold. As Steffensen and Fill (2014) stress, one avoids compartmentalizing of natural, symbolic, sociocultural, and cognitive ecologies. Accordingly, they link Gibsonian ideas with Maturana’s work (see Section ‘Critical issues and topics’) and Kravchenko’s (2007; 2016) view of languaging. In replacing the individual by environmentagent systems, they reconnect the epistemic, the embodied and the cultural. Steffensen and Kramsch (2017) propose four principles: (1) language learning and use are emergent; (2) much depends on an environment and its affordances; (3) in education, language has a mediating function; and (4) language learning experience unites the historical, the subjective, and the conflictual (Steffensen and Kramsch 2017). Learning emerges in a reciprocal play of identity and human powers, and as a result, no explanatory power falls to linguistic objects: ‘[A] language’ is a theoretical construct. It is not an entity that we can know or use; it is not a competence that precedes actual utterance behavior. Rather language is an act of languaging; it is a whole-bodied achievement (Thibault 2011), and what we come to recognize as words, grammar, lexicon, etc. are second-order constructs (Love 1990). Steffensen and Kramsch (2017: 7) Acts of languaging (see Section ‘Critical issues and topics’) mesh bodies, perception, and action. Objectifications like language, utterances, discourse, and text describe what people treat as valued constraints. In an enlanguaged world, human powers change the ecosphere. Turning from links of socialization with acquisition, the ecolinguist can ask how persons actualize practices as varies as, say, grandmothering, talking, or making pottery. Socialization arises as people set off dialogical appropriation (Dufva 2012) and, while using practices, mesh doing with knowledge-getting. As for Halliday (1997), meaning potential requires semogenesis. When moved to think or speak, people act subjectively and, at times, resist power: as they speak, they are moved to use epistemic tools. Later, (in Section ‘Current contributions’), I trace how verbal patterns can affect intelligent activity as people draw on simplex principles in, say, teamwork, flexibility, emotional intelligence, and so on. People extend familiarization (and statistical learning) by attending, acting and using ‘effort after meaning’ (Reed 1996: 102). Contra the Douglas Fir Group (2016), learning relies on neither ‘moment to moment’ 376

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use of language, nor ‘neurobiological mechanisms and cognitive capacities’. Indeed, appeal to language use masks how humans construct both knowing and as selves. In tracing how people happen in language, one turns to complex social behaviour that has no need for mental gymnastics – what Chemero (2011) terms radical embodied cognition. Languaging and practices unite living with ways of reusing material, cultural, and epistemic resources (see Steffensen and Cowley 2021). Eco-cultural heritage influences how an individual develops powers. In illustration, one can ask how traces (e.g. icons, alphabets, digits) serve as symbolizations (Kravchenko 2007). In literacy practices, they bind individual understanding into culture in ways that affect practical action, languaging, and human action. As part of social entanglements (Pennycook 2020), written traces are embedded with acting, awareness, computation, and across groups, signage, discourse, work, and media. For sociopolitical reasons, the displays often serve powerful groups. In a world where algorithms control text, anonymous forces gain new power. Critical voices can ask how they link practices, automaticity, and skilled linguistic action. Accordingly, in Section ‘Recommendations: the case of reading’, I turn to reading and, above all, its role in understanding; we use reading to actualize practices. It is based in not codes and processing but, rather, how we have come to use textual resources to make constructive use of other peoples’ powers.

Critical issues and topics In denying that people ‘know’ linguistic objects, one turns to empirically discoverable features of individuals. By definition, a person’s powers ‘account for the causal work those individuals do’ (Lassiter and Vukov 2021: 1). In this way, 20th-century appeal to learning, representation, and dynamics is replaced by attention to the multiscalarity of human behaviour. Ethnography and modelling can be used to examine events, errors, happenings, and crucially, how systems shape acting, judging, and ‘what happens’. Rather than reify socialization, one asks how, together and alone, people build powers as they intertwine practices, acting, and ways of languaging. Spontaneous processes link languaging to semiotic resources. People use chronotopes, timescales and complexity (Blommaert 2013), semiotic landscapes (Eckert 2018), and thus, distributed cognitive systems (Hutchins 1995). Persons perform as part of wider systems (i.e. in a role) and, at once, as responsible living agents with beliefs. Human agency is, in a precise sense, distributed: within organized activity, emplacement can channel languaging, action, and semiotic construal. In orienting to (and as) semiotic assemblages, we link observing to the evoked, and discernible and the possible. Whilst Pennycook shows how semiotic infrastructures serve the dominant groups, the ecolinguist turns to how action draws on ideation. In practice, signs do things to us and we do things with signs: slowly, we adopt and develop ways of knowing. In Elizabethan terms, understanding informs languaging: as Mulcaster (1582) notes, schoolboys grasp Greek or Latin by using the vernacular to render text aloud. In such as case, natural innovation links ancient memories, classroom activity, understanding, and languaging. As the living voice (and body) challenges appeal to reason, the academy suppresses such views (and turns to linguistic knowledge). Yet the power of languaging is such that, for 500 years, the concept kept returning (see Cowley 2019). In most parts of the world, of course, the human was never reduced to a source of reason. In China, for example, wisdom allows that 续 (xù), or ‘aligning’, enables people to continue, create and complete (Wang and Wang 2015). Like xù, languaging is personal and particular. Echoing Heidegger and Maturana, Becker brought a related idea back to the academy by arguing that human activity defies linguistic categories: 377

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‘There is no such thing as Language, only continual languaging, an activity of human beings in the world’ (Becker 1991: 34). As language lacks any ‘real’ correlate, linguistic theory uses objectifications. Just as some communities believe in spirits, ancestors, or atoms, those who draw on English invoke fictions known as ‘words’. Even in an age where socialization highlights digital traces, infants begin by learning to talk. They use natural innovation as they draw on expression, engage in practices, and by sensitizing to the normative, self-construct as speakers. While reliant on emplacement, a child gradually learns to hear repeatable, second-order constructs (‘words’). However, she begins with wordings (i.e. physical events) that transform action opportunities. Later, she discovers gains in meshing action and perception while taking a language stance (Cowley 2011) or using utterances as ‘utterances of something’ (Love 2004). Given a history of entrenchment, skilled linguistic action gradually reshapes talk and activity such that, in time, a child learns to avow beliefs and offer reasons. As Becker (1991: 34) says, languages exist as an activity of ‘human beings in the world’ (my italics). Languaging enacts activities such as: ‘speaking, hearing (listening), writing, reading, “signing” and interpreting sign language . . . activities that can be united by a specific superordinate verb’ (Love 2017: 115). For Cowley (2014b), languaging is defined as activity in which (physical) wordings play a part – for a perceiver, the results have a verbal aspect and, thus, use wordings. One can investigate how languaging contributes to practices. However, to pursue (what the folk call) language learning, humans must draw on normative practices, institutions, and equipment. Crucially, given how people draw on habitus (Bourdieu 1977), practices are multiply actualized. They adapt to a place, a meaning and how, as a living person, one uses simplex tricks. With Maturana (1978), languaging arises as structural coupling, enabling infants to self-construct as observers who say things (see Kravchenko 2007). Within an environment (medium), practices enable people to discern. In an enlanguaged world, acting is channelled by patterns of usage (Schmid’s [2020], ‘language-systems’). Over a history of recursive action, languaging permeates believing, voicing, and knowing. In an enlanguaged world, a person appropriates ways of acting, perceiving, and speaking. With emplaced experience, sign-perfused perception emerges and, as Sellars argues, sets off ‘languagings’. In Love’s (2004) terms, bodies use first-order activity that, given later entrenchment, wordings come to echo phrasings (viz. second-order constructs). As observers act – and are perceived to act – practices gradually align with norms of usage. People are socialized as they actualize practices by drawing on bodies that orient to the orientations of others. Powers arise as one is moved, observes, responds with feeling, and at once, anticipates. Languaging uses constraints as practices favour epistemic resources that include beliefs about, say, languages, minds, spirits, and so on. By appeal to autopoiesis, Maturana treats living as already intentional. In what Raimondi (2019) calls a bio-logic, his view treats directedness as given. A similar but more carefully grounded view arises Sellars’ (1960) account of how languagings arise (see Seiberth 2021). On this view, a verbal aspect comes to activity as wordings and thoughts draw on immersion or non-relational intentionality. For Sellars, perceiving is partly isomorphic with the world (or, as above, uses emplacement): thus, in biting into a biscuit, I may think or covertly language coconut. The languaging re-enacts individual history: in my enlanguaged world coconut is part of a biscuit and, at once, of feeling, tasting, and doing. Such picturings are often covert and, yet, can be inferred or reported (see Seiberth 2021). They inform a common realm that unites people across domains of culture, natural innovation, and practices. The transcendental view (Seiberth 2021) both parallels Halliday’s (1997) appeal to semogenesis and reaches beyond the verbal. For Sellars, languagings bring emplacement to future action: they are often silent. They allow inhibition and favour vicariance. We learn to say what we do not think – languagings are 378

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modified by practices. Although wider than Halliday’s semogenesis, like use of text, Sellars’ languagings link living, praxis, and experience of verbal (or lexico-grammatical) resources. In simple cases (coconut), they are more basic than association or logic. As isomorphisms, they are ‘engineered’ by nature. In ecological terms, natural innovation triggers languaging and thoughts: within practices, they enact understanding.

Current contributions Ecolinguists can aim to build a sense of living, develop theories of practice, reshape learning, and inspire practical action. While seeking awareness of destructive social, political, and economic contradictions (Freire 2000 [1970]), new weight falls on how the pre-reflective can be used to change attitudes and invite action. Hence, investigative methods turn to how wholebody expertise and experience play out as people act and orient to what, as selves and others, they say, feel, think, and do. As part of human agency, languaging extends how experience and practices draw on the pre-reflective. In what Malafouris (2020) calls material engagement theory, the power of the pre-reflective appears in a paradigm case of pottery making. In creating an artefact, a potter relies on (1) acting with clay (and other resources), (2) fashioning a final product, and (3) modulating how he works by using enactive signification. Eye, brain, and hands evoke personal experience as responsive feeling unites with a potter’s use of social norms. In what Malafouris (ibid.) also calls thinging, materials prompt pre-reflective sensitivity and an impulse (akin to 续, or xù). In parallel, the ecolinguist traces languaging to bodies and natural innovation. As with pottery-making, perceiving sets off acting, shapes products, and in flux, triggers how the pre-reflective serves to modulate action and thinking (thoughts). Practices prompt people to use expertise and novelties as they draw on wordings that unite feelings, attitudes, and actions. The results bear on local standards and, invariably, carry an individual mark. Ethnography can track innovation, change and individual understanding. By starting with languaging, one can reveal effective and idiosyncratic ways of acting-by-writing (see Juffermans 2015). Elsewhere, self-taught techniques are shown to aid advanced learners in meaningmaking (Swain and Lapkin 2011) or in making the effort to learn a Chinese character (Ho and Li 2019). Methods like cognitive event analysis show how insight uses felt pico-dynamics and interactivity (Steffensen et al. 2016) or, indeed, how problem avoidance uses the pre-reflective (Trasmundi and Linell 2017). One can also reverse the logic by tracing learning to pre-reflective practice and languaging (Hellerman and Thorne 2020). Just as in making pottery, learners rely on activity based in ‘cultural ecosystems’ (Hutchins 2014). In languaging, we use norms as we tackle tasks, work materials, feel the mood, and engage with others who treat wordings as physical aspects of activity (at times, using ‘belief’ in words). A person can manage causal powers while interpreting with an image from space or acting as a teacher. Performance adjusts to the norms of a cognitive ecosystem (e.g. a group of astronomers) such that semiotic resources (e.g. images from the Hubble) change perspectives and engender know-how. Organized activity can thus be shown as three dimensions of change (Secchi and Cowley 2021). As people concert, they use (1) the infrastructural, normative, and material dynamics of practices (e.g. note-making, keyboards); (2) experience-based in practical action and enactive signification (listening, thoughts); and (3) how experience and expertise trigger emplaced semiotic resonances. In such activity, whether automatic or voluntary, parties re-evoke the once lived and/or said as they orient to things and people. For bioecological beings, the feeling of what happens binds emplacement, decorum, and languaging. At times, we track events, and at others, we pick out social, political, or ideational gaps and contradictions. 379

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Material engagement and languaging unites phenomena, such as (1) slow creativity, (2) flexibility, (3) teamwork, and (4) emotional intelligence. Often these are seen as ‘soft skills’ that elude definition. Indeed, as Kechagias (2011: 31) notes, they manifest ‘appropriate performance in particular contextual/situational conditions’ and do so ‘despite the fact that this performance is only carried out thanks to the prior existence and combination of personal and contextual resources’. However, since the skills are not traits, they are better seen as powers. What Lassiter and Vukov (2021) call ‘individual causal work’ is performed within distributed systems. One person shapes the orientings of another and, in an enlanguaged world, each can bring forth understanding. In language teaching, soft powers are crucial: for Coroamă-Dorneau and Urlica (2018), a ‘mistake-friendly environment’ helps learners in  ‘forging a community and purpose’. Given emplacement, soft powers inform learning and, at times, grant pleasure (Coroamă-Dorneanu and Urlica 2018). There is more at stake. Soft  powers also enable human ‘becoming’ as epistemic results derive from co-perceiving and awareness. As shown in a study of American and Chinese children, they can find learning language enjoyable and relatively effortless (Zheng et al. 2018). Yet much learning requires effort after meaning. In video ethnographic study of an Oxford tutorial, Grzegorczyk (2019) examines how two students use the same ‘learning space’. While one tries to manage the tutorial by being friendly as rehearsing what she ‘knows’, the other attempts spontaneous, genre specific meaning generation. For the tutor, the latter’s performance is superior: she uses soft powers in knowledge construction. Her talk is (1) critical, (2) emplaced, and (3) future-directed. At the risk of oversimplifying, if the one party uses social awareness, the successful student uses more person-centred powers that bring a constructive attitude to anticipation and practical action.

Recommendations: the case of reading Once demystified as abstracta, linguistic categories become integral to how an observer perceives patterned aggregates that can function as symbolizations. A reader can use the ‘traces’ as visible patterns and, as one adjusts attending, orient to text. Acts of reading prompt activity that leads to epistemic outcomes. Readers skim, scan, sub-vocalize and, like Mulcaster’s school boys, render wordings aloud. For Benne (2021: 2), like actors in a scene, readers rely on, ‘customs, apparatuses, contextual constraints phantasmagoric realities, embodied engagement with surroundings and technologies’. At times, resources trigger explicit ‘thoughts’. However, this constructive power carries a corollary: Benne (2021: 3) also notes that ‘the concept of reading covers such a vast spectrum of possible scenes of reading that trying to find out anything about reading in general seems futile’. Reading is ecologically embedded experience across a distributed system of person, text, and beyond. Hence, a person uses both languaging and the flux of animated embodiment. A special issue of Language Sciences brings a distributed view to reading (Trasmundi and Cobley 2021). In surveying how ‘close reading’ is perceived in British higher education, little or no weight falls on construction or the reading ecology. For many respondents, reading is a skill or, for the authors, invites a ‘gift or package to be taken away’ (Cobley and Siebers (2021: 17). The view fits a ‘simple view of reading’ (Hoover and Tunmer 2018) where ‘decoding’ is seen as enabling brain-based comprehension. For Cobley and Siebers (2021: 18), skill views fit a ‘transactional, instrumental, information-based approach’ and the (neo)liberal view of education as a business opportunity that trains young people in ‘transferable skills’. They also use poor science: even if eye-based movement occurs (Braille is not considered), there is no reason to posit decoding. There is no evidence that ‘reading’ uses either a (specific) ‘process of 380

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visual perception’ or a signature behavioural pattern. In fact, an eye-based reading skill could be foundational only if the following conditions were met: 1 2 3

Reading occurred in the head. The eye-based behaviour linked a kind of neural activity (visual perception) to ‘processing’ that generates comprehension. Comprehension was determined by linguistic features of written language.

Neither machines, brains, nor persons work this way. Thus, if computers ‘read’, they use not eyes but probabilities and a vector space. While brains, it seems, use probabilities, these index aggregated letter shapes (Dehaene 2009). Finally, persons use emplacement as part of practices. People vary how they bind changing, anticipative experience with the intelligent use of frequency information. Many read faster than a body can vocalize or sub-vocalize (Nation 2009). Attending matters: people skim, scan, attend, inhibit, and act vicariously. In effortful activity, a reader may reread or render aloud while changing strategy choice, jumping passages, and altering focus. Tactility (Mangen 2016), empathy (Kuzmičová et al. 2017), and imagining  immersion (Singer and Alexander 2017) shape a reader’s world. Reading differs demographically (Tveit and Mangen 2014) and affects the inner ear (Trasmundi et al. 2021). It makes use of vicariance and the not said (why this wording?). As meta-analysis (e.g. Clinton et al. 2019) shows, use of paper correlates with measures of deeper reading. In a distributed system, an emplaced person selects some text that is imbued with enactive signification. Reading is textually constrained practice within a given reading ecology: people actualize expertise as bodies bring soft powers to the use of materials. Inspired by Trasmundi and Cobley, I therefore sketch broad recommendations. • • • • • • • •

Teach quality reading as practical action (Trasmundi et al. 2021). View reading as learning to relish effort after meaning. Make use of critical, emplaced, and bioecological awareness: reading needs feelings, covert languagings, and above all, skill in gauging and monitoring felt responding. Build pedagogy that attends to emplacement and lived experience. Distinguish reading from online knowledge-gleaning. Read aloud: stress slow creativity and semogenetic powers. Challenge the politics of treating young people as consumer-workers who need the skill of reading (and functional literacy). Stress the transformative and how, even today, reading can challenge (neo)liberal doctrines within and beyond the academy.

Future directions Having rejected loose use of ‘ecology’, ecolinguistics blossomed. Attention to sustaining vital relations between living systems increasingly replaces discussion based on discourse and verbal categories. In practice, semiotic assemblages co-function with the causal and thus also natural innovation. Indeed, people exercise powers by bringing languaging together with action – they reach epistemic ends while also changing themselves. Far from relying on skill or ‘processing’, readers link pre-reflective semiotic flux with so-called effort after meaning. Bodies and probabilities work together with how symbolizations are perceived. The view challenges any appeal to an ideal reader who relies on skills. As with appeal to a standard language or high prestige accent, a simple view of reading reifies forms and processing. In ignoring how 381

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a reader acts, it too inadvertently serves class interests. Models of processing or code mask how semiotic flux contributes to becoming. Quality reading takes effort, motivation, and practice – and the will to resist. At a time of ecological collapse, positive social action cannot rely on values like individualism, free choice, and universalism (Cobley 2016). To bring about ecosocial change, we may need new kinds of education. In China, hundreds of thousands of teachers use ecolinguistics to link reading to a desideratum of harmonious living (Huang and Zhao 2021). While some take a distributed view (Li et al. 2020), most link Chinese philosophy, ecological issues, and discourse analysis. Outside China, education is still dominated by the ideal learner. On an organism-centred view, one too often replaces natural innovation with appeal to skills, knowledge, and competencies. Learning is separated from persons, emplacement, and how we draw on semiotic resonances. Of course, we are unlike information processors. Where puzzled, we may reread, render aloud, and in a suitable setting, link experience with modes of discussion. When we understand, soft powers, imagining, and effort can inform our thinking – and that of others. As with a Möbius loop, when agency, practices, and languaging are cut apart, new wholes appear. Nascent ideas may challenge classism and growthism or, perhaps, trigger framings, new attitudes, and bioecological awareness. Yet all knowing is fragile – we grasp ideas as we actualize practices. When thoughts dawn, we can change our languaging.

Related topics language socialization; second language acquisition; social semiotics and multimodality; translanguaging

Further reading Steffensen, S. V. and Cowley, S. J. (2021) ‘Thinking on behalf of the world: Radical embodied ecolinguistics’, in Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, London: Routledge. (Unlike the current contribution, the focus falls on presenting an ecological view of cognition that challenges all varieties of cognitivism. The paper is complementary to how ecolinguistics can be used in practical action in that it argues against all forms of representationalism.) Steffensen, S. V. and Kramsch, C. (2017) ‘The ecology of second language acquisition and socialization’, in Encyclopedia of Language and Education, London: Springer. (Both authors have had a major role in bringing ecolinguistics to applied linguistics – first, by using ‘ecology’ loosely and, later, in building a transformational view. The paper thus marks a crucial turning point from which a great deal of new work has arisen.) Stibbe, A. (2015) Ecolinguistics: Language, Ecology and the Stories We Live By, London: Routledge. (This classic text by the world’s best-known ecolinguist is aimed at students and a wide public. It illustrates how ecolinguists can use traditional structuralist methods in giving attention to the actual ecology. While still built on linguistics, it is an excellent introduction to the aims of the field, is popular with students and comes with a free, online course.)

References Alexander, R. J. (2017) ‘Investigating texts about environmental degradation using critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistic techniques’, in A. F. Fill and H. Penz (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Ecolinguistics, London: Routledge, pp. 196–210. Barron, E. S., Hartman, L. and Hagemann, F. (2020) ‘From place to emplacement: The scalar politics of sustainability’, Local Environment, 25(6): 447–462. Becker, A. L. (1991) ‘Language and languaging’, Language & Communication, 11(1): 33–35.

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30 Translanguaging Li Wei

Introduction Ever since Colin Baker coined the word translanguaging in 2001, it has caught the imagination of researchers and practitioners in the fields of education, language, cognitive science, communication, media and cultural studies, and beyond. Yet there is still considerable confusion over what translanguaging is about, why it is necessary amongst a plethora of similar new terms as well as the traditional concepts, what it means for language teaching and learning, linguistic change, and human communication and cognition, and how to overcome many of the challenges in policy and practice that translanguaging poses. This chapter reviews the origins and developments of the concept of translanguaging and discusses its added values. It will also review the research evidence for the theoretical claims behind translanguaging as an approach to language and cognition and impact of the translanguaging pedagogy on language learning and language education. Future directions of translanguaging research will be explored.

Historical perspectives The current conceptualization of translanguaging originated from four related but different fields of enquiry: minority language revitalization, bilingual education, second language acquisition, and distributed cognition and language. Cen Williams observed in the Welsh revitalization programmes in the 1990s a classroom practice where the teacher tried to teach in Welsh but the students tended to respond in English. The students were expected to do their assignments in Welsh but often they referred to English language sources. The policy of the Welsh revitalization programmes was, as it is to this day, that only Welsh should be used, whereas the reality was that all the teachers and learners knew English and used it in many different contexts. Rather than seeing the alternation between the languages in a negative way, Williams argued, against the stated policy, that it could be used to the benefits of both the student and the teacher, as it helped to maximize the learner’s bilingual capacity in learning. Williams’ doctoral thesis (1994) was on this practice which he described as trawsieithu in Welsh. Baker, who was Williams’ supervisor, introduced his work to the English-speaking world in the textbook Foundations of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism (Baker 2001; latest edition: Baker 386

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and Wright 2017), initially with the term ‘translingualfying’ and later by adding the ‘trans’ to ‘languaging’ as ‘translanguaging’. The term became widely known across the world largely due to Ofelia García’s work on bilingual education policy and practice in the United States, especially the education of minoritized children of Hispanic background who were labelled ‘bilingual’. These children were often assumed to be in need of remedial education because they had incomplete exposure to English, and therefore, their English proficiency was lower. Their Spanish was assumed to be interfering with their English, which impacted negatively on their content learning and general school attainment. García argued that there was no evidence that the Hispanic children’s apparent under-achievement was caused by their English language skills. Rather, it was the linguistic and educational ideologies that favoured one-language-only (English in this case) or one-language-at-a-time, and the policy that no home language was allowed in the classroom, that discriminated against those children and disadvantaged their learning. Translanguaging – ‘multiple discursive practices in which bilinguals engage in order to make sense of their bilingual worlds’ (García 2009: 45) – would empower the learner and maximize their potential for learning. It would also empower the instructor and transform the way we teach and support our students in the process of knowledge construction. When Baker added the ‘trans’ prefix to ‘languaging’, he also alluded to the sociocultural theories of second language acquisition where the idea of languaging had existed for some time. In particular, Merrill Swain (2006) used the term to describe the cognitive process of negotiating and producing meaningful, comprehensible output as part of language learning as a ‘means to mediate cognition’ – that is, to understand and to problem-solve (2006: 97) – and ‘a process of making meaning and shaping knowledge and experience through language’ (p. 97). She gave specific examples of advanced second language learners’ cognitive and affective engagements through languaging, whereby ‘language serves as a vehicle through which thinking is articulated and transformed into an artefactual form’ (Swain 2006: 97). She also mentioned Hall’s work on languaging in psychotherapy (Hall 1999) where ‘talking-it-through’ meant ‘coming-to-know-while-speaking’ (Swain and Lapkin 2002). The connection Swain and the others made between languaging and thinking is a particularly useful one when it comes to understanding the cognitive capacities of bilingual and multilingual language users. By adding ‘trans’ to ‘languaging’, it captures their ‘talking-it-through’ in multiple languages, but emphasizes the entirety of the learner’s linguistic repertoire, rather than knowledge of specific structures of specific named languages separately as other prefixes such as ‘multi-’ or ‘poly-’ might do. Another field where the concept of languaging has been developing for some time is that of distributed cognition and language, sometimes known as ‘ecological psychology’. The key argument here is that ‘human languaging activity is radically heterogeneous and involves the interaction of processes on many different time-scales, including neural, bodily, situational, social, and cultural processes and events’ (Thibault 2017: 76). Language as we ordinarily know it in the form of conventionalized speech and writing is a second-order product of this continuous activity of languaging. Fundamentally, this particular perspective on cognition and language invites us to rethink language not as an organism-centred entity with corresponding formalism, such as phonemes, words, sentences, and so on, but as ‘a multi-scalar organization of processes that enables the bodily and the situated to interact with situation, transcending cultural-historical dynamics and practices’ (Thibault 2017: 78). It sees the traditional divides between the linguistic, the paralinguistic, and the extralinguistic dimensions of human communication as nonsensical and emphasizes what the researchers call the orchestration of the neural-bodily-worldly skills of languaging. In particular, it highlights the importance of 387

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feeling, experience, history, memory, subjectivity, and culture. Although they do not talk about ideology and power, it is entirely conceivable that these too play important roles in languaging. On language learning, it advocates a radically different view that the novice does not ‘acquire’ language, but rather ‘they adapt their bodies and brains to the languaging activity that surrounds them’. And in doing so, ‘they participate in cultural worlds and learn that they can get things done with others in accordance with the culturally promoted norms and values’ (Thibault 2017: 77). The work of both the sociocultural theorists of second language learning and the distributed cognition and language researchers is connected with Michael Halliday’s argument that language is a ‘meaning potential’, and linguistics is the study of how people exchange meanings by ‘languaging’ (1985). By adding the ‘trans’ to ‘languaging’, the concept of translanguaging highlights what Vivian Cook calls the ‘multi-competence’ of language learners and users, not only in multiple languages but also in coordinating multiple linguistic, cognitive, and semiotic resources in language learning and language use (see Cook and Li 2016).

Critical issues and topics One of the most frequently asked questions regarding translanguaging is: how is it different from code-switching or other newer terms such as polylanguaging, metrolingualism, and the like? All terminologies have their theoretical and conceptual rationales. Code-switching, for example, pays more attention to the structural differences between named languages, and a code-switching analysis would start by identifying how many languages are involved and what they are. Polylanguaging and other similar terms emphasize the involvement of multiple languages. Translanguaging, on the other hand, regards the concept of named languages such as English, German, Dutch, and so on as primarily sociopolitical and highlights the human capacity to transcend the boundaries between named languages in meaning-making. In fact, it emphasizes human beings’ ability to deliberately break the boundaries of named languages to create novel ways of expression and communication, in bilingual puns, literacy and artistic works, and everyday social interaction. There are three senses of the ‘trans’ prefix that are particularly important: • • •

Transcending boundaries between named languages and between language and other cognitive and semiotic systems Transformative potential of the act of translanguaging for the language user not only with regard to their linguistic capacity but also their identities and worldviews Transdisciplinary approach to human communication and learning, breaking the traditional boundaries between linguistics, psychology, sociology, education, and so on

It is important to emphasize that translanguaging does not deny the existence of named languages as sociopolitical entities, but challenges the assumption that named languages reflect social or psychological realities. Research on language evolution and in historical linguistics show that all human languages evolved from fairly simple combinations of sounds, gestures, icons, symbols, etc. Social groups form speech communities by sharing a common set of communicative practices and beliefs. But language contact, borrowing and mixing, have always been an important part of evolution and the survival process. What is more, the naming of languages is a relatively recent phenomenon. It was the invention of the nation-state that triggered the invention of the notion of monolingualism and the association between one language and one nation. In the meantime, there is ample research evidence from neuroscience 388

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that differently named languages are not represented or controlled by different parts of the brain. The mixing and switching between named languages by bilingual and multilingual speakers in everyday social interaction is fluid and dynamic. Efforts to identify and locate a ‘language switch’ in the brain have proved to be futile. We also fully accept that there are many language users whose environment and experience have led them to a heightened awareness of the differences between named languages, who consequently keep their languages separate. Their language awareness, however, is not purely of linguistic structures but includes the sociocultural and political histories and values of the named languages. They will therefore exercise different cognitive control in ‘selective language use’ (one language at a time) versus fluid language use (as in translanguaging). Their cognitive representation includes this awareness. It is at least in part a result of experience and environment, and is subject to change over time. Translanguaging stresses that human languaging practices are socioculturally evolved and are a product of socialization within the community; therefore, it is not only the structural features that differentiate named languages but also the historical, political, and ideological meanings that have become associated with them. A multilingual is then someone who is aware of the existence of the political entities and the sociocultural meanings of differently named languages and has an ability to make use of the structural features of some of them that they have acquired in context from specific communities. From the very beginning, translanguaging was not conceived as an object to identify and analyze, but a practice and a process: a practice that involves different named languages and language varieties but more importantly a process of knowledge construction that makes use of but goes beyond named language(s). It concerns effective communication, function rather than form, cognitive and sociocultural activities, and language production. The prefix ‘trans’ and the suffix ‘ing’ together aim to transform our understanding of the nature of language from a set of codes to a dynamic process of meaning-making (Li 2018). Translanguaging highlights multilingual language users’ creativity and criticality: [C]reativity can be defined as the ability to choose between following and flouting the rules and norms of behaviour, including the use of language. It is about pushing and breaking the boundaries between the old and the new, the conventional and the original, and the acceptable and the challenging. Criticality refers to the ability to use available evidence appropriately, systematically and insightfully to inform considered views of cultural, social and linguistic phenomena, to question and problematize received wisdom, and to express views adequately through reasoned responses to situations. These two concepts are intrinsically linked: one cannot push or break boundaries without being critical; and the best expression of one’s criticality is one’s creativity. Multilingualism by the very nature of the phenomenon is a rich source of creativity and criticality, as it entails tension, conflict, competition, difference, change in a number of spheres, ranging from ideologies, policies and practices to historical and current contexts. Whilst rapid globalization has made everyday life in late modernity look increasingly routinized, repetitive and monotonous, or in the words of the sociologist Ritzer’s, The McDonaldization of Society (1993), the enhanced contacts between people of diverse backgrounds and traditions provide new opportunities for innovation, entrepreneurship, and creativity. Individuals are capable of responding to the historical and present conditions critically. They consciously construct and constantly modify their socio-cultural identities and values through social practices such as Translanguaging. (Li Wei 2011: 1223–1224) 389

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Current contributions and research Whilst translanguaging has expanded as a theoretical concept and an analytical framework that has been applied in a number of related fields, its primary concerns remain in language-related education, particularly the education of learners who have multiple languages in their repertoire and who may also be socioeconomically and culturally minoritized or disadvantaged. Following García’s work with Hispanic communities in the US, researchers and practitioners all over the world have explored the use of translanguaging as a pedagogy in the education of bilingual and multilingual learners where the medium of instruction is officially in English or some other dominant international or national language (e.g. Mazak and Carroll 2016; García and Kleyn 2016; García et al. 2017). Most of the studies use linguistic ethnography and focus on the degree of participation and engagement in learning by bilingual and multilingual learners. The key issue that these studies aim to address is the role of the so-called ‘home’ or ‘community’ language in children’s learning. Researchers argue that if we regard education as a process of knowledge construction rather than simply transmission of information, facts, and skills, then the language in which knowledge is constructed becomes highly significant. Language is not simply a set of abstract codes; it carries a specific history and cultural heritage. Knowledge constructed through a specific named language evokes history and culture in particular ways. Restricting or denying access to knowledge in particular languages would amount to discrimination. It is a moral and ethical issue that all educators must consider. Such issues aside, there is no scientific evidence to suggest that the use of home or community language has any detrimental effect on children’s learning. In fact, all available evidence points to the contrary, and that is, home or community languages can be a useful facilitator in learning as it maximizes the learner’s opportunities to access information and understand concepts. As such, they can contribute positively to knowledge construction as well as to building confidence and identity. Research evidence further supports the use of multiple languages simultaneously as in Translanguaging because it maximizes the opportunities for the bilingual and multilingual language user to exercise their executive control and manage their linguistic repertoire for effective communication and learning (e.g. Bialystok et al. 2014; Prior and Gollan 2011). Barac et al. (2014) carried out a systematic review of studies, showing consistent findings that active engagement with two named languages, no matter how short and regardless of the language pairs involved, contributed positively to non-verbal executive control and theory of mind. In a series of studies of social cognition of bilinguals and multilinguals who habitually mix and switch their languages, Dewaele and Li (2012, 2013) and Kharkhurin and Li (2015) found language mixing and switching correlated with their test scores in standardized empathy, tolerance of ambiguity, and creativity (as assessed by the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking). More evidence is emerging that the positive effects of language mixing and switching on executive control and other cognitive capacities occur not only in early bilinguals but also in later learners of additional languages. The reported effects of dynamic multilingual practices apply not only to the use of home or community languages by minoritized learners but also to second, foreign, and additional language learning in general. That includes, of course, English L1 users learning modern foreign languages. We must not forget that the purpose of language learning is to become bilingual or multilingual, not to become another monolingual in a different language. And most bilingual and multilingual language users mix and switch between named languages for communicative purposes. Yet in modern foreign language education, we rarely consider using the bilingual and multilingual who mixes and switches their languages as the model for learning, and instead, we use the idealized monolingual native-speaker as the model and regard language mixing and switching as examples of incomplete or deficient learning. 390

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Recommendations for practice Language educators sometimes find it easier to understand and accept the moral, ethical, and scientific arguments than to tackle the practical and pedagogical challenges posed by policy and the school and classroom environment. In most parts of the world, the school curricula are designed to serve the interests of the assumed majority and tend to be associated with the dominant national language. Monolingual ideologies of one-language-only or one-languageat-a-time dominate the language-in-education policies. Students get categorized by nationality and ethnicity, with a corresponding language. It is very rare for multiple ownership of multiple languages to be recognized in the school curriculum. Assessment regimes further exacerbate the situation with insistence on monolingual practice. Rarely do we see school examinations conducted in multiple languages simultaneously. Language tests do not test the learners’ ability to coordinate their linguistic repertoire in the form of language mixing and switching, nor the higher-level executive controls, but to focus on monolingual standards and completeness-based models of linguistic competence. The latter are those that assume that native speakers have the complete knowledge of their native language and can produce error-free forms and structure, and that is the model for second language learners to aim to achieve. The idea of complete knowledge of a language is a fallacy. Nobody can claim complete knowledge of a language, whether one is classified as a native speaker or not. And a completeness-based model for teaching and assessing language can only result in learning deficits. A competent language user is one who makes the best of what they know of a language for effective communication, and for a competent bilingual and multilingual language user, that includes the ability to mix and switch between languages and the ability to make the appropriate assessment of which language to speak to whom, when, why, and how. We need to devise assessment regimes that best demonstrate this multi-competence of the bilingual and multilingual by assessing their abilities to integrate, rather than to separate, features from different named languages into meaningful wholes. There are many psychometric and cognitive tests for combined abilities. It is entirely conceivable to design a test with different parts of speech in different languages (say, nouns and adverbs in English and verbs and adjectives in Spanish) and ask the test takers to make up grammatical sentences with elements from both named languages and see what structural adaptation (e.g. gender and number agreements) they make in order to do so. We also need to challenge the monolingual education policies that neglect or even discriminate against multiple ownerships of multiple named languages to provide the learners with opportunities to maximize their linguistic and cultural potential in schools and in the classroom. The practical challenges for implementing a translanguaging pedagogy are usually more serious to the teacher rather than the learner. Although teachers agree in principle that it is beneficial to bring more languages into the school and the classroom, they find it hard to manage so many different languages that the teachers themselves do not know. In many parts of the world and in inner-city schools in industrialized countries, this is often the reality. The teachers are concerned that not all languages could be given equal opportunities to be used. Moreover, teachers are given limited class time but challenging targets, often in the form of exam results and league tables. Again, these are realities that teachers have to face on a daily basis. The key here is how we see the roles and responsibilities of the teacher. If we continue to see the teacher as the main, if not the sole, source of knowledge in the classroom and their role as the transmitter of knowledge, we would then expect the class time to be mostly spent on teachercentred teaching. But if we regard the teacher as what Brantmeier (2013) calls ‘joint sojourners on the quest for knowledge’, the teacher would become a learning facilitator, a scaffolder, and 391

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a critical reflection enhancer, while the learner becomes an empowered explorer, a meaningmaker, and a responsible knowledge constructor. As Brantmeier points out, a facilitator doesn’t get in the way of learning by imposing information. A facilitator guides the process of student learning. A scaffolder assesses the learner’s knowledge and builds scaffolding to extend that knowledge to a broader and deeper understanding. And a critical reflection enhancer asks the learner to reflect on what is being learned and the process of learning (meta-reflection about process). In the meantime, an empowered explorer is ‘an independent or collective explorer of knowledge through disciplined means. And a meaning-maker and responsible knowledge constructor is one who engages in meaningful knowledge construction that promotes relevancy to her/his own life’. Adopting such an education philosophy would then open up spaces for the teacher to explore pedagogical alternatives together with the learners, a crucial part of which involves the use of multiple languages in the classroom. A translanguaging pedagogy requires not the same linguistic and cultural knowledge as the learners but an open mindset and willingness to be a co-learner who believes that they can learn just as much, if not more, from the other learners. Again, it should be pointed out that a translanguaging pedagogy does not assume that all the named languages that the learners bring into the classroom are the same or of equal status in society. It in fact encourages the development of critical language awareness, which includes not only awareness of the structural features and pragmatics of specific named languages but also the sociopolitical histories of the differently named languages and their symbolic values. Translanguaging was never coined with the intention to replace terms such as code-switching. It has clearly caught the imagination of lots of people, not least language teachers, with an unintended consequence that more and more people have started using translanguaging instead of the other terms. Translanguaging is not a thing in itself! As a descriptive label, it refers to communicative practices that transcend the boundaries between named languages and between languages and other cognitive and semiotic systems. From an analytical perspective, it questions the notion of language as systems of discrete structures (García and Li 2014). CUNY-NYS Initiative on Emergent Bilinguals (www.cuny-nysieb.org/translanguagingresources/translanguaging-guides/) is a project of the Research Institute for the Study of Language in Urban Society (RISLUS) and the PhD Program in Urban Education at the City University of New York’s Graduate Centre. The website contains rich resources for teachers, including practical guides to translanguaging pedagogies in the classroom, resources for working with particular learner groups, culturally relevant books and other resources, and guides to developing leadership programmes.

Future directions There is a great deal of interest in translanguaging both as a conceptual and analytical concept for the study of human language, communication, and cognition, and as a pedagogical principle. Broadly speaking, the following areas can be explored from a translanguaging perspective.

Translanguaging creativity in multilingual and multimodal interaction Social media and other new information technologies provide a unique space for translanguaging and enable creative use of languages and other signs in everyday interaction at very high speed. There already have been numerous studies of new forms of mixing of letters, 392

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numerals, symbols, emojis, memes, and so on on digital platforms and mobile devices. Social media communication is highly multimodal. For users of non-alphabetic languages in particular, social media affords new opportunities for them to be creative by mixing scripts, emojis, other signs and pictures, video, voice, for example. The speed of the interaction is extremely fast and can reach people across the globe instantly. What is most significant is the capacity to allow the media users to create their own signs and scripts. It raises many new questions not only in terms of how and why people create new expressions, but also how people infer the meaning of new expressions when they see them for the first time. Many of the new words and scripts seem to be created in a way that goes against conventional principles of writing systems because the creations do not have standard pronunciations. Implications of translanguaging for language evolution are potentially huge and need to be studied systematically.

Linguistic landscaping and language management Since translanguaging involves a lot of language play, it is often used in advertising and other commodified language practices. In addition to the description of creative and clever uses of translanguaging, especially the new inventions, we should pay attention to the exploitation of translanguaging for commercial gains. Many translanguaging researchers notice creative multilingual practices in the linguistic landscape. Combining translanguaging research with linguistic landscape research can generate very interesting results, not only about the creativity of multilingual language users but also about the history of the community and the sociocultural changes in the place. Public uses of translanguaging raises questions about language policy and language management. How should such uses be managed?

Language education With enhanced awareness of the importance of linguistic diversity and language rights, language education has become a central issue for policy and practice. Globalization has also contributed to phenomenal growth in the teaching and learning of foreign languages, but especially English. On the whole, though, additional language education programmes have remained largely monolingual in their pedagogical approach: there is still a strong belief amongst language instructors, students, and parents that the most effective way to learn a new language, whether it is the standard national language for ethnic minority communities or a foreign language such as English, is to use the target language alone. Total immersion is assumed to be the best way. Translanguaging fundamentally challenges such monolingual ideologies and practices. Can the translanguaging principle be accepted and practised more widely in language education, especially in foreign language education? Can the language assessment regime accept translanguaging practices? Can the ability to translanguage be regarded as an indication of higher communicative and pragmatic competence? These are tough questions for professional practitioners as well as policy-makers in language education.

Related topics conceptualizing language education; second and additional language acquisition; language teaching and methodology; bilingual and multilingual education; multilingualism; minoritized/Indigenous language revitalization; ecolinguistics in practice 393

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Further reading García, O., Flores, N., Seltzer, K., Li, W., Otheguy, R. and Rosa, J. (2021) ‘Rejecting abyssal thinking in the language and education of racialized bilinguals: A manifesto’, Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, 18(3): 203–228. (This is a landmark article that represents the latest thinking of the concept and its radical ideas for language education.) García, O. and Li, W. (2014) Translanguaing: Language, Bilingualism and Education, Houndsmill, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. (This award-winning volume is one of the most authoritative and comprehensive accounts of the development and rationale of the concept. It contains examples of how the concept applies to bilingual education.) Li, W. (2018) ‘Translanguaging as a practical theory of language’, Applied Linguistics, 39(1): 9–30. (This is a position paper that outlines translanguaging as a practical theory of language that raises fundamental questions beyond language education, in fields such as of human cognition and communication.) Li, W. (2022) ‘Translanguaging as method’, Research Methods in Applied Linguistics, 1(3): 100026. (This article outlines significant methodological shifts that the concept of translanguaging aims to facilitate.) Li, W. and García, O. (2022) ‘Not a first language but one repertoire: Translanguaging as a decolonizing project’, RELC Journal, 00336882221092841. (This article clarifies some of the misunderstandings of the concept of translanguaging and responds to practical questions regarding translanguaging in education.)

References Baker, C. (2001) Foundations of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. 3rd ed., Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Baker, C. and Wright, W. (2017) Foundations of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 6th ed., Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Barac, R., Bialystok, E., Castro, D. C. and Sanchez, M. (2014) ‘The cognitive development of young dual language learners: A critical review’, Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 29(4): 699–714. Bialystok, E., Poarch, G., Luo, L. and Craik, F. I. M. (2014) ‘Effects of bilingualism and aging on executive function and working memory’, Psychology and Aging, 29: 696–705. Brantmeier, E. J. (2013) ‘Pedagogy of vulnerability: Definitions, assumptions, and applications’, in J. Lin and E. Brantmeier (eds.), Re-Envisioning Higher Education: Embodied Pathways to Wisdom and Transformation, Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, pp. 95–106. Cook, V. and Li, W. (eds.) (2016) The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Multi-Competence, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dewaele, J. M. and Li, W. (2012) ‘Multilingualism, empathy and multicompetence’, International Journal of Multilingualism, 9(4): 352–366. Dewaele, J. M., and Li, W. (2013) ‘Is multilingualism linked to a higher tolerance of ambiguity?’, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 16(1): 231–240. García, O. (2009) Bilingual Education in the 21st Century: A Global Perspective, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. García, O., Johnson, S. I., Seltzer, K. and Valdés, G. (2017) The Translanguaging Classroom: Leveraging Student Bilingualism for Learning, Philadelphia, PA: Caslon. García, O. and Kleyn, T. (eds.) (2016) Translanguaging with Multilingual Students: Learning from Classroom Moments, London: Routledge. García, O. and Li, W. (2014) Translanguaing: Language, Bilingualism and Education, Houndsmill, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hall, L. M. (1999) Languaging: The Linguistics of Psychotherapy: How Language Works Pscho-Threaputically, Ann Arbor, MI: UMI. Halliday, M. A. K. (1985) ‘Systemic background’, in J. Benson and W. Greaves (eds.), Systemic Perspectives on Discourse, Vol. 1: Selected Theoretical Papers from the Ninth International Systemic Workshop, Westport, CT: Praeger. Kharkhurin, A. V. and Li, W. (2015) ‘The role of code-switching in bilingual creativity’, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 18(2): 153–169. Li, W. (2011) ‘Moment analysis and translanguaging space: Discursive construction of identities by multilingual Chinese youth in Britain’, Journal of Pragmatics, 43(5): 1222–1235. Li, W. (2018) ‘Translanguaging as a practical theory of language’, Applied Linguistics, 39(1): 9–30. 394

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Mazak, C. M. and Carroll, K. S. (eds.) (2016) Translanguaging in Higher Education: Beyond Monolingual Ideologies, Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Prior, A. and Gollan, T. H. (2011) ‘Good language-switchers are good task-switchers: Evidence from Spanish-English and Mandarin-English bilinguals’, Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society, 17: 682–691. Swain, M. (2006) ‘Languaging, agency and collaboration in advanced second language learning’, in H. Byrnes (ed.), Advanced Language Learning: The Contributions of Halliday and Vygotsky, London: Continuum, pp. 95–108. Swain, M. and Lapkin, S. (2002) ‘Talking it through: Two French immersion learners’ response to reformulation’, International Journal of Educational Research, 37: 285–304. Thibault, P. J. (2017) ‘The reflexivity of human languaging and Nigel Love’s two orders of language’, Language Sciences, 61: 74–85. Williams, C. (1994) Arfarniad o Ddulliau Dysgu ac Addysgu yng Nghyd-destun Addysg Uwchradd Ddwyieithog [An evaluation of teaching and learning methods in the context of bilingual secondary education]. Unpublished doctoral thesis. University of Wales, Bangor.

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Note: Page numbers in italic indicate a figure and page numbers in bold indicate a table on the corresponding page. affect 308–311, 313 ageing 267–276, 271; see also cognitive ageing agency 22–27, 39–40, 47–49, 86–87, 137–139, 143–145, 374–379 anthropology see linguistic anthropology applications 153–154, 156–157 archiving 364–365, 367–368, 370 attrition 243–250 big data 73–74 bilingual dictionaries 216, 226–227 bilingualism 8–13 bi/multilingual education 286–287, 351–357 business communication 123, 125, 127–128 capital 140–141, 143; bilingual 13; cultural 105, 143, 234; human 21, 25; linguistic 141; racial 165; social 143 child language acquisition 45–53 clinical linguistics 254–263, 267–276 cognition 374–377, 386–388, 390, 392 cognitive ageing 267–269, 274–275 collocations 218, 220–223, 225–227 colonial language 32, 370 communication 254–255, 257, 259–263; see also ethnography of communication context 68–75, 321–322, 324, 326, 329–330, 333 corpus-based discourse analysis 101 corpus linguistics 208, 220–224, 231 critical applied linguistics (CALx) 57–50, 64–65 critical discourse analysis (CDA) 57–61, 63–65, 324, 330–331

396

critical discourse studies (CDS) 57–59, 61, 63–65 critical ethnography 97, 100 critical genre analysis 128–129, 132 critical pedagogy 137, 344 critical realism (CR) 57, 64 critical sociolinguistics 96–97, 99–101, 105–106, 163–166, 169–170 crosslinguistic interaction (CLIN) 246 cultural differences 83–86, 88 culture 81–89, 141, 145, 163, 167, 351, 356–357 cybercrime 286 decolonizing 2–3, 184, 312, 314, 353–357, 369–370 dementia 267–268, 270–275 desiring 308–309, 311 diaspora 21, 23–24 digital language and communication 68–76 digital media 324, 331–332 digital storytelling 143, 145 discourse 57–65, 254, 256, 258–260; critical discourse analysis (CDA) 57–61, 63–65, 324, 330–331; critical discourse studies (CDS) 57–59, 61, 63–65 disinformation 176–185 distributed cognition 374–377, 386–388 distributed language 374–378, 380–381 doctor-patient relationship 109–110, 112 documentation 362–364, 367–370 dynamic model 247 dynamic systems theory 246

Index

ecolinguistics 374–382 education 321, 324, 328, 332; see also bi/multilingual education; ethnography in education effective communication 109, 112, 114 ELF corpora 192; see also English as a lingua franca embodiment 308–309, 311–312 empathy 111, 114, 117 endangered languages 349, 352, 355–356, 362–370; see also Indigenous languages; language revitalization English as a lingua franca (ELF) 187–196 English for specific purposes (ESP) 187–196 ethnicity see language and ethnicity ethnocentrism 83, 88–89 ethnography 73–75, 377, 379–380; of communication 292–293, 295–298, 300; in education 292–293, 296–299; see also linguistic ethnography evidence see language as evidence exclusion 19–22 Expanding Circle English 187–188; see also English as a lingua franca; World Englishes experiential metaphor 324–325 family language policy 44–53 forensic linguistics 283–288 gender 53, 115–117, 137–140, 151–160, 170–171, 285, 310–312, 342 gerontolinguistics 267–268, 275–276 Global Englishes see World Englishes globalization 20, 27, 230, 232, 236–238 healthcare linguistics 109–113, 115–118 hegemony 180–181, 365 identity/-ies 68–72, 74–75, 137–146, 235, 341–342 ideology 58–64, 137, 140–143, 177–180, 184, 365–366, 369 Indigenous language 349–357; see also endangered languages; linguistic human rights Indigenous scholarship 306–307, 309, 314–315 inequality 47, 84–87, 96, 100–101, 180, 234–235, 296–300 Inner Circle English 187–195 institutional discourse 94–106, 234; critical issues and topics 96–97; current contributions and research 97–105; future directions and recommendations for practice 105–106; historical perspectives 95–96 interactional sociolinguistics 84–85, 157, 166, 170, 293 interculturality 84–86, 89 interdiscursivity 123, 129–133, 133 interpreting 230–238

intersectionality 138, 140–141 investment 138–145, 142 justice, social 280–284, 288 kinship 44–53 language activism 349, 351–353, 356 language and ethnicity 163–170 language and race 163–171 language as evidence 280–285 language development 243–244, 246–250 language endangerment 349, 352, 355–356, 362–370 language ideology/-ies: family language policy 44–49, 51–52; language and migration 19–22, 26; language policy and planning 36, 38, 40–41; minoritized/Indigenous language revitalization 351–353, 356–357; translanguaging 387–389, 391, 393 language in clinical linguistics 254–258, 260–263, 337–344 language planning 44, 47–48 language policy 19–22, 25–26, 362–364, 366, 370 language revitalization 349–357, 362–364, 367–370 language rights 37–38 language shift 350–351, 355, 357, 362–367, 369–370 language teacher identity 137–146 languaging 310, 315, 374–382; see also translanguaging learners’ dictionaries 217–220, 221, 223, 225 learning and ecolinguistics 375–382 legal texts 281–282 lexicography 216–227; advent of learners’ dictionaries 217–220; bilingual dictionaries 226–227; definitions 225–226; lexicography and corpus linguistics 221–224; lumping versus splitting 220–221; role of examples 224–225 lexis 218, 281 lingua franca see English as a lingua franca linguistic anthropology 292–293, 296 linguistic change 49, 189, 267, 386 linguistic ethnography 292–301; see also ethnography linguistic human rights 352; see also endangered languages; Indigenous languages; language revitalization; minoritized languages linguistic imperialism 236 linguistic innovation 187, 193 linguistic landscapes 10, 12–13, 337–344 linguistic performance 268–269, 272–276 literacy studies 293 lumping versus splitting 220–221 media 320–325, 327, 329, 331–333 medical communication 109–118, 232–233 medication 113 397

Index

metafunctions 322–324 metalinguistic awareness 9, 12 metaphor 96–99, 105 migration 19–27, 45–50, 232, 244–247, 297–298, 340–343 minoritized language 349–357; minoritized learners 386, 390, 393; minority languages 7, 9–14 mobility 19, 21, 23, 26–27 mode 320–327, 329–330, 333 multilingualism 7–14, 19–20, 23–26, 45–51, 337–343, 387–393 multilingual narratives 243–250 multimodal corpus 272, 275–276 multimodality 69–72, 74–76, 230, 237, 320–321; and analysis of digital media 331–332; and analysis of everyday interaction 331; and critical discourse analysis 330–331; educational applications 328–330; future developments 332–333; and social semiotic analysis 323–328, 323, 325, 328 multi-perspective approach 125–129, 131 narrative(s) 182–183, 232, 236; see also multilingual narratives neurodegenerative disease 270 onto-epistemologies 306–307, 309–310, 314 Outer Circle English 187–188, 191, 194; see also English as a lingua franca; World Englishes participant observation 294, 300 patient-centred care 110–111, 117–118; see also doctor-patient relationship phonetics 254–257, 259–260, 262 phonology 254–260, 262 politics 176–184 post-colonial era 32 post-digital 75–76 posthumanism 306–315 post-qualitative inquiry 313–314 poststructuralism 57, 59, 63–64, 137–139, 144, 146 power 137–139, 141–145 power relationship 9, 86, 176–182, 184, 293, 296, 367 practical action 374, 377, 379–381 practice: ecolinguistics 374–382; translanguaging 11, 386–393 pragmatics 254, 256, 258–260 preservation 362, 366, 369 professional communication 123–133, 123; critical issues 127–128; historical perspective 124–127; implications for English 131–133, 133; insights from current research 128–131 professional practice 126, 128–133 propaganda 183 provenance 309, 324 398

psycholinguistics 243–250 public spaces 337–344; see also linguistic landscapes qualitative 342–343 quantitative 340, 342 race see language and race raciolinguistics 163–165, 167, 169–170 reclamation 349–350, 352 reflexivity 293, 295–296 relational ontologies 306, 308–309, 312, 316 relativism 57, 59, 61, 63–64 revitalization 349–357 revival 369 semantics 255–256, 258 semiosis 342, 344 sex 155–156 sexuality 151–160 sign language grammar 203, 205, 208 sign language literature 207 sign languages 203–212 social constructionism 293 social constructivism 63–64 social semiotics 321–322; educational applications 328–330; future developments 332–333; modes and media 323–325, 323; multimodal integration 325–328, 325, 328 sociolinguistics 243–250; see also interactional sociolinguistics speech 254–257, 259–262 speech-language pathology 270, 274–275 splitting versus lumping 220–221 spoken interaction 282–284 stereotypes 82, 88 superdiversity 19 system networks 323, 323 three circles model 187–188 translanguaging 10–14, 386–393; critical issues and topics 388–389; current contributions and research 390; future directions 392–393; historical perspectives 386–388; recommendations for practice 391–392 translation 230–238 transnational 19, 26–27 trust 109, 111, 114 truth 57–64 typology 244, 247–249 vocabulary control 217–218 workplace discourse 96 workplace ethnography 292–293, 298–299 World Englishes (Global Englishes) 187–196